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...

We study the impact of numerical expenditure rules on the propensity of governments to deviate from expenditure targets in response to surprises in cyclical conditions. Theoretical considerations suggest that due to political fragmentation in the budgetary process expenditure policy might be...

Im öffentlichen Sektor laufen die Finanzmittel zum Jahresende aus, sodass die Verantwortlichen einen starken Anreiz haben, die verbleibenden Mittel kurz vor Ablauf der Frist ineffizient auszugeben. Die Arten von Ineffizienzen dieses Verhaltens, seine Ursachen und dessen Ausmaß werden erörtert...

In der Juniausgabe 2022 veröffentlichte der Wirtschaftsdienst einen Aufsatz mit dem Titel "Dezemberfieber senken: Vermeidung von verschwenderischen Jahresendausgaben" von Christoph Siemroth. Gunnar Schwarting vertritt in einer Replik eine andere Auffassung, im Anschluss erläutert Christoph...

The EU budget review process will restart as we approach the end of the current financial framework 2007-2013. This paper traces the history of the EU budget and draws lessons for the review to come. Whatever reforms are proposed, they must serve to shift spending to policy areas and instruments...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the potential of e-Government tools to enable the general public to oversee spending of public institutions. The paper illustrates the watchdog potential of reducing corruption by means of providing information to the public on the example of the Czech...

We investigate empirically the effect of government purchases on unemployment in 20 OECD countries, for the period 1960-2007. Compared to earlier studies we use a data set with more variation in unemployment, and which allows for controlling for a host of factors that influence the effect of...

It is widely recognised that public-sector purchasers tend to discriminate in favour of domestic suppliers. We study the consequences of home-biased public procurement on international specialisation. In the theoretical analysis we find two effects. First, a country will specialise in the sector...

This paper examines whether fiscal illusion can help to explain the behavior of federal government expenditures in Brazil during period 1990-2011. The analyses is based on a median voter model that admits that the degree of tax visibility may affect the individual's perception of his tax burden...

In this paper, we show that, contrary to common beliefs, over the past two decades several countries were able to reduce public spending by remarkable amounts. These countries did not seem to have suffered from these large reductions either in a macroeconomic sense, or in terms of lower values...