Economic growth is one of the objectives of the current government. Fiscal policy, encompassing government expenditure and taxation decisions, can significantly impact on economic growth. This paper proposes a framework which views fiscal policy through three lenses and applies this approach to...

The financial and economic crisis in the Euro area has revealed a number of important flaws in the economic policy framework in Europe. On the one hand, the imbalances, which have dominated European development since the introduction of the euro, are not sustainable; and this is more serious in a...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on economic growth in the presence of fiscal consolidation in South Africa. Markov-switching dynamic regression (MSDR) and time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) were performed using time series data from 1994 to...

President Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package (the “American Rescue Plan”) on March 11, 2021. Without a corresponding increase in taxes, this plan has set off alarm bells for those concerned about the expansion of government deficits and debt. Mainstream economists have raised...

Building on the automatic fiscal stabilisers literature, this paper assesses how automatic stabilisers have evolved over the past two decades by analysing changes in the personal income tax and social benefit systems. In three-quarters of the 35 OECD countries analysed, indicators of the...

In the Great Recession most OECD countries used short-time work (publicly subsidized working time reductions) to counteract a steep increase in unemployment. We show that short-time work can actually save jobs. However, there is an important distinction to be made: While the rule-based component...

In the Great Recession most OECD countries used short-time work (publicly subsidized working time reductions) to counteract a steep increase in unemployment. We show that short-time work can actually save jobs. However, there is an important distinction to be made: While the rule-based component...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...