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...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession, many countries face substantial deficits and growing debts. In the United States, federal government outlays as a ratio to GDP rose substantially from about 19.5 percent before the crisis to over 24 percent after the crisis. In...

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...

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 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...

This paper is focused on the options for reducing the U.S. fiscal deficit in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first part of the paper is devoted to an assessment of the economic outlook and the impact of the financial crisis on the medium-term fiscal balance of the federal government....

New Zealand's fiscal outlook deteriorated following the Global Financial Crisis, and in late 2008 fiscal projections showed net government debt in New Zealand increasing from 5% of GDP to around 40% within 10 years, mostly reflecting permanently lower expectations for future tax revenue. These...

Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...

We examine the ability of the Expansionary Fiscal Contraction (EFC) hypothesis to explain the performance of of OECD economies during times of crisis. We find some limited evidence in its favour: if public consumption is reduced in response to a fiscal crisis (as defined by a high level of...