Even by international standards, Ireland's fiscal position was particularly affected by the recent financial crisis. As budgetary surpluses quickly gave way to significant deficits post 2007, the deterioration in the Irish public finances culminated in an Excessive Deficit Procedure being...

Small open economies within a monetary union have a limited range of stabilisation tools, as area-wide nominal interest and exchange rates do not respond to country-specific shocks. Such limitations imply that imbalances can be difficult to resolve. We assess the role that government spending...

Blanchard and Leigh (2013, 2014) find fiscal multipliers to be underestimated in the EU in the deep recession of the early 2010s. Using two 2013-2018 datasets for 26 EU member states, assembled from Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts, we show that...

Revenue from taxation has become more volatile after the global financial crisis. In this paper we provide a mean-variance analysis for key taxation components in the Irish fiscal accounts. This approach is a useful complement to the more standard measures of fiscal developments, which typically...

The likely substantial impact of Covid-19 related measures on the public finances of European countries has prompted an unprecedented call for new and significant policies at a European level to alleviate the pressures on individual member states. The administrative closures adopted across a...

Blanchard and Leigh (2013, 2014) find fiscal multipliers to be underestimated in the EU in the deep recession of the early 2010s. Using two 2013-2018 datasets for 26 EU member states, assembled from Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts, we show that...

Data from member states' Stability and Convergence Programmes from 2011 to 2018 are used to assess the cyclicality of government consumption in the EU after the European Semester took effect. Econometric estimations, which address endogeneity issues, find the intended (ex-ante) fiscal policy to...

The cyclicality of fiscal policy in Ireland in the budgetary plans put before parliament and ex-post is considered. Data in budgetary documents and particular econometric estimation procedures help address endogeneity issues and provide numerous variable-estimation procedure combinations for...