This paper investigates the relevance of the No-Ponzi game condition for public debt (i.e. the public debt growth rate has to be lower than the real interest rate, a necessary assumption for Ricardian equivalence) and of the transversality condition for the GDP growth rate (i.e. the GDP growth...

Fiscal rules are argued to be important for sound and sustainable fiscal policies and have been increasingly adopted over the last 20 years. As increased fiscal pressure and fiscal risks urge countries to address the public debt legacy left by recent economic crises, fiscal rules come under...

In Europe, fiscal policy will be distinctly more restrictive from 2011 onwards. The fiscal consolidation efforts scheduled for 2011 represent 1.2 percentage points of GDP in the eurozone and 1.8 percentage points in the UK. Such adjustments hit short-term demand and depress activity by Keynesian...

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are presented to prove the poor quality of the structural budget balance in assessing the effectiveness of budget consolidation efforts. Changes in the structural budget balance currently used as an indicator of fiscal stance give a significantly...

In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, as, in some cases, it...

This paper describes recent trends on the efficiency of stabilisers in the European Union. Using both macro evidence on the cyclical sensitivity of budget deficit to economic activity, and micro evidence on the tax and expenditure profiles, we conclude, in agreement with the recent literature,...

This study examines reforms of public expenditure in industrialised countries over the past two decades. We distinguish ambitious and timid reformers and analyse in detail reform experiences in eight case studies of ambitious reform episodes. We find that ambitious reform countries reduce...

EU fiscal rules are a highly divisive topic. Although there is a broad consensus that rules are needed to ensure a smooth functioning of the euro area, views very much diverge over the effectiveness of current arrangements and over how and when to move ahead. This paper reviews the debate around...

The transmission mechanisms of fiscal policy are significantly affected by informality in the labour market. Extending a narrative database of fiscal consolidations in 14 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean between 1989 and 2016 in order to account for heterogeneity in terms of...

We welfare rank various tax-spending-debt policies in a New Keynesian model of a small open economy featuring sovereign interest-rate premia and loss of monetary policy independence. When we compute optimized state-contingent policy rules, our results are: (a) Debt consolidation comes at a...