The study will first outline the way in which Germany's fiscal policy was driven for several decades by a paradigm that centered on deficit control and reduced state involvement in the economy. It will assess the damage wrought by this strategy; for example, underinvestment in infrastructure and...

Per effetto della crisi economica che si è realizzata con particolare intensità nel corso del 2009, molte economie avanzate hanno intrapreso percorsi di risanamento fiscale. Nell'ambito di tali misure un ruolo non trascurabile è rappresentato dagli interventi di riduzione della spesa per il...

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...

The European Union (EU) accepted ten new member states (NMS) in 2004. These countries, mostly former socialist countries, have had to adjust their economic policies to the EU’s standards. Perhaps most difficult has proven to be fiscal policy whereby NMS must comply with the Stability and...

This paper examines the consequences for the sustainability of fiscal policy of imposing restrictive ceilings on deficits and debt. Our theoretical framework is a generalization of the government intertemporal budget constraint which allows for time-varying interest rates, endogenous primary...

Using a stochastic growth model we derive analytic expressions for optimal labour and capital tax rates under both complete and incomplete markets. We find taxes are driven by two factors reflecting : (a) Ramsey efficiency considerations and (b) the financing needs of the government which vary...

We compute average mark-ups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries covering the period 1970-2007, show...

The paper considers the case for an internationally coordinated further fiscal stimulus during the second half of 2009. Although this makes some of the analysis period-specific, most of the issues and principles considered are timeless. For a fiscal stimulus to be both effective there must be...

Using administrative wealth records from Denmark, we study the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation. Denmark used to impose one of the world's highest marginal tax rates on wealth, but this tax was drastically reduced and ultimately abolished between 1989 and 1997. Due to the specific...

We examine the distributional and efficiency impacts of climate policy in the context of fiscal consolidation in a dynamic general-equilibrium overlapping generations model of the US economy. The model includes a disaggregated production structure, including energy sector detail and advanced...