Deficits and debts are very complex issues for eternal public debate. The norm of budget balance - whether as a value judgment or ideal, as a political symbol or as a budgetary principle - often appears in literature and public debate over federal budgetary and fiscal policies. This paper offers...

This paper investigates the heterogenous effects of budget balance rules on fiscal policy in a large sample of countries. To derive country-specific treatment effects of fiscal rules and conduct inference, we use a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Method. Our results indicate that countries...

Although the Netherlands entered the so-called Great Lockdown with a strong fiscal position, the Dutch fiscal balance is projected to deteriorate by an unprecedented magnitude, largely as a result of necessary fiscal measures deployed to weather the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This...

The European Union's constitutional balanced-budget amendment, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), dictates that EU member states keep their budget deficits within three percent of GDP and that government debt be kept at or below 60 percent of GDP. After 20 years, unintended consequences of the...

This paper discusses an alternative route to a balanced budget, namely through debt control. Two models are compared: the debt brake which has been used in Switzerland since 2003 and the debt limitation model proposed by Compact for America. The paper concludes that the former, while apparently...

Q1 2018 saw relatively high growth rates in regions' revenues and expenditures. Regions with lowest revenues posted relatively slow growth rates in revenues for two straight years, thereby mounting their debt burden and reflecting further differentiation in the development of Russia's territories

In Q1 2018, the federal budget revenues exceeded the revenues seen during the same period of 2017. Oil and gas revenues rose while oil and gas income fell. Budget expenditure decreased against January-March 2017 which ensured the federal budget surplus. By the end of Q1 2018, dynamic of the...

The draft law “On the Federal Budget in 2019 and the 2020-2021 Planned Period” suggests a budget maneuver in favor of productive expenditures. The federal budget is to become the main source of growth of the Russian economy in the next three years. There are problems related to the budget...

In 2018, the federal budget revenues moved up by 2.4 p.p. of GDP against 2017 not least because of the oil and gas revenues which grew by 2.2 p.p. of GDP and the expenditures contracted by 1.7 p.p. of GDP compared to the previous year. The federal budget limitation due to the budgetary rules has...

Generational accounting is a relatively recent methodology that measures the fiscal burden government policies impose on future generations. Comparing the fiscal burden of future generations to the burden levied on current newborns yields the generational imbalance. Micro data from the Household...