Vor der Bundestagswahl im September 1998 zeichnete sich ab, daß die Steuerreform weiterhin auf der Tagesordnung beiben würde. Die Vebreiterung der Bemessungsgrundlage hat darin einen wichtigen Stellenwert.Der Subventionsabbau ist ohnehin ein witschaftspolitischer Dauerbrenner. Das...

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...

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...

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...