Many economists are convinced that longer-term benefits from fiscal consolidation are in a trade-off with short-term deceleration in output growth. However, more recent research suggests that curbing fiscal imbalances contributes to faster growth already in the short term. This paper is about...

In this paper, we examine the macroeconomic effects of alternative fiscal consolidation policies in the New Area-Wide Model (NAWM), a two-country open-economy model of the euro area developed at the European Central Bank (cf. Coenen et al., 2007). We model fiscal consolidation as a permanent...

The paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature that has investigated the conditions under which a contractionary fiscal policy is effective in reducing debt and deficit, but does not have a negative effect on growth. The issue is central to macroeconomics and policy making, given...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s.We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

The progress made by the national government in consolidating its fiscal position between 2002 and 2006 proved unsustainable as its revenue effort started to go down once again in 2007 after a brief improvement in 2005-2007. With the more expansionary stance taken by the government in 2009 as...

The 2011 and 2012 fiscal program appears to score high in terms of contributing to the speed of fiscal consolidation despite limited gains in revenue generation. This came about largely because of fairly serious underspending during the first nine months of 2011. The slow utilization of spending...

The short-term effects of fiscal consolidation have attracted an increasing attention from both the academia and policy makers in the recent years. Authors in the literature on non-Keynesian effects usually put the emphasis on the need for the devaluation of the national currency, the...

The paper examines the effects of political trust on fiscal consolidations. Building on the works of Easton (1965) and Gamson (1968) a theoretical framework is derived on the main channels through which the success of fiscal consolidation can be affected by the level of political trust in the...

The objective of this paper is to gain insights into the relationship between deficit-reducing policies and the evolution of the debt/GDP ratio. We consider past events of fiscal consolidation in a selected group of EU countries, by using the new data set recently made available by Devries et...

This paper estimates the impact of fiscal consolidation on unemployment and job market flows across EU countries using a recent database of consolidation episodes built on the basis of a "narrative" approach (Devries et al., 2011). Results show that the impact of fiscal consolidation on cyclical...