In the second half of the 20th century, Spain provides a case of political regime change, which according to some political economy models should also lead to a shift in the cyclical nature of fiscal policy. We find that in most of the pre-democratic era, there was a strong procyclical bias to...

It is a generally documented fact that political cycles are a phenomenon of new democracies. In this paper we deepen the evidence for the new EU member countries that are a prominent example of recently established democratic systems. We show that, in line with the opportunistic theory, primary...

This paper explores the implications of the political economy model of Battaglini and Coate (2008) [8] for the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle. The model predicts that fiscal policy is counter-cyclical with debt increasing in recessions and decreasing in booms. Public spending...

As oil and gas are exhaustible resources, the need for economic diversification has gained momentum in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries immediately after the end of the first oil boom in 1973-74. Economic diversification, in the context of GCC countries, implies development of the...

In the first age of rapid economic growth after 1945, fluctuations of western European output and employment were so mild that the very notion of a cycle was transformed or even seemed obsolete. A second period of much slower average economic growth was marked by large and frequent oscillations,...

In this paper we investigate the economic dynamics of a seven-equation model of the business cycle. The main distinctive features of the model are related to: (a) the role played by the public sector in redeploying income between workers and capitalists, since it is assumed that the bargaining...