The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a surprisingly large expansion in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the...

This paper extends the neoclassical growth model with productive public capital by including an infrastructure efficiency index, which is assumed to depend on a public choice variable, in particular, the share of public spending allocated to productive public consumption. A golden rule for the...

According to a standard argument, higher income inequality fosters redistributive activities of the government in favor of the median income earner. This paper shows that if redistribution is achieved by a public provision of goods and services rather than by transfers, higher income inequality...

There are problems in the measures of the size of the public sector both from the perspective of welfare state policies, monetary policy and the analysis of the economic role of public sector in general. In practice there are several different measures (e.g. total tax rate, total government...

Aimed at understanding some of the factors explaining the growth of GDP, in the Portuguese case, to understand the correlation and is degree, on the situation of our sample, we conclude that the general linear model (Manso 1998), despite being fairly simple, is suitable to our purpose. This...

A number of emerging markets have experienced substantial real exchange rate appreciation in recent years, generating concerns about competitiveness and prompting policymakers to respond with a combination of mitigating policies. This paper shows that fiscal policy can play a role in alleviating...