Samuelson's Multiplier-Accelerator model is based on the economic mistake of adding together desired investment and actual savings to derive aggregate expenditure, when it is the sum of actual investment and actual savings. Its fluctuations are not a model of the business cycle, but convergence...

We define the notion of 'de facto fiscal space' of a country as the inverse of the outstanding public debt relative to the de facto tax base, where the latter measures the realized tax collection, averaged across several years to smooth for business cycle fluctuations. We apply this concept to...