The paper compares fiscal cyclicality across regions and countries from 1960 to 2016. It finds that more than half of 170 countries analyzed in seven regions had, in more recent years, limited fiscal space, and that their fiscal policy was either cyclical or procyclical. This was particularly...

In 2009, just before the full outbreak of the global financial crisis, Olivier Blanchard (2009) published an article giving a favourable appraisal of the state of macroeconomics. He came to this verdict on the basis that, after a long period of fierce theoretical debate, the discipline had...