This paper responds to the development policy debate involving the World Bank and the IMF on the use of fiscal policy not only for economic stabilization but also to promote economic growth and increase per capita income. A key issue in this debate relates to the effect of the composition of...

Barro's model is an AK model, and there cannot be dynamic inefficiency since the social yield of the capital is higher than the growth rate. But it may be that the private yield and thus the interest rate are lower than the growth rate. One can thus have a Ponzi game and the government can allow...

Whether public debt is internal or external, the burden is equivalent in the OLG model. This equivalence holds, regardless of whether the definition of burden reflects Modigliani's view or Lerner's perspective. It results from the assumption of perfect substitutability between public debt and...

In standard public finance theory a government's cost of borrowing depends on the common beliefs held by rational investors regarding default risk. We advance understanding of the effects of diverse beliefs and overconfidence among investors in their ability to assess the sovereign's...

The public debt crisis threatening the survival of the euro area. This crisis could appear as a byproduct of the global financial crisis. In fact, it refers to structural problems specific to Europe and the question of optimal currency area which has been in place since 1999. The sovereign debt...

The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower...

Lack of coordination between the monetary and fiscal authorities will result in inferior overall economic performance. This paper studies the interactions between monetary and fiscal policies and its effect on the economic performance by using al cointegration tests in the case of Euro Area....

This article provides a historical overview of the factors leading up to debt crises and the default methods used by the governments to solve them, ranging from repudiation and restructuring to inflation tax and financial repression. The paper also analyses the Spanish governments’ graduation...

Projections indicate the US Federal debt held by the public may exceed 70–100% of GDP within 10years. In many respects, the temptation to inflate away some of this debt burden is similar to that at the end of World War II. In 1946, the debt ratio was 108.6%. Inflation reduced this ratio by...

The recent financial crisis was characterized by the sizeable fiscal cost of banking sector bail out operations and the significant automatic and discretionary fiscal policy response to shrinking output, which have put increased pressure on public finances in many industrialized countries. This...