The current European fiscal framework is highly complex. The multitude of fiscal rules and the discretion in their enforcement precludes an effective oversight and weakens the effectiveness of fiscal rules substantially. Against this background, we present a proposal for a careful refocusing of...

Wagner's Law is the first model of public expenditure in the history of public finance. It suggests that during the process of economic development the share of public spending in national income tends to expand (Wagner, 1883). Nevertheless, Peacock and Scott in 2000 wrote a paper entitled...

This policy note presents an assessment of the EU budgetary package for 2021-2027, including the European Union Recovery Instrument 'Next Generation EU' (EURI-NGEU), with an introduction to the EU decision-making process and the state of play of the relevant legislation as well as an annexed...

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge towards a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU Member States engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through...

This paper aims to analyze the nexus between disaggregated public spending and GDP in the Euro Area for the period 1990-2010 at a disaggregated level, using a time series approach. We estimated this nexus for ten items of public spending according to the COFOG functional classification. Taking...

We re-examine the conventional view that to be successful, fiscal adjustments should rely on spending cuts and not on tax increases. We apply the Bai-Perron structural break filter instead of ad hoc rules to identify fiscal adjustments and their successfulness in 20 OECD countries. Our results...

The EU Services Directive was adopted in 2006 to foster competition in services across Europe. However, progress in liberalizing services has fallen short of expectations due to the article 15 of the Directive, which allows countries to maintain pre-existing restrictions if judged necessary to...

European Union member countries are currently exposed to negative implications of the economic and debt crisis. Questions associated with disputable implications of fiscal incentives seem to be contrary to the crucial need of the effective fiscal consolidation that is necessary to reduce...

As democracies around the world have faltered, legal scholars in fields as diverse as election law, labor law, and administrative law have turned to tax law to repair and support democratic governments. Taxation offers a toolset well equipped to address concerns raised by democratic theorists...