Stéphanie Guichard, Michael Kennedy, Eckhard Wurzel and Christophe André examine the circumstances most commonly related to successful fiscal consolidation. Data are drawn from a dataset covering twenty-four OECD countries since 1978. Based on improvement in the cyclically-adjusted primary...

Fiscal consolidation is required in most OECD countries. This is especially so in view of medium and long-term spending pressures on public finances, related, inter alia, to ageing. Based on a dataset covering a large number of OECD fiscal consolidation episodes starting in the late 1970s, the...