In recent years debt in Colorado has increased at an unsustainable rate. A debt brake is simulated for the Colorado economy. When the debt brake is triggered the spending cap imposed by the Tabor Amendment is reduced, with surplus revenue earmarked for debt reduction. The simulation analysis...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...

Since the 1990s at least, UK HM Treasury has been leading a general transformation of public service and the relationship between public and private sectors, driven by a distinctive preference for the private sector. This preference has led to transplant the IFRS to provide a balance sheet...

This article provides a theoretical view on European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS), focusing on overarching accounting principles and models, as well as their consequences on the working and the very existence of public service activity. Our analysis applies to illustrative cases...

Both the German federal as well as the general government recorded a surplus for the fourth time in a row in 2017. The fast consolidation after the Great Recession coincided with the transition period for the full introduction of the federal debt brake, which is sometimes interpreted as...

A neoclassical growth model with constant saving rates, publicly provided services and public debt is used to analyse the impact of a federal structure. The main focus is on the existence and the stability of steady states. It is shown that the equilibrium in a federation with publicly provided...

During the last quarter of 2008, state pension funds fell in value by approximately $350 billion. Depending on the state, the losses were equivalent to as little as 12% of the own revenue (taxes, fees, and charges) generated by the state government in the previous fiscal year, or as much as 68%....

Fiscal rules, such as the Excessive Deficit Procedure and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), aim at constraining government behavior. Milesi-Ferretti (2003) develops a model in which governments circumvent such rules by reverting to creative accounting. The amount of this depends on the...

In this Article, I critically examine the assumption that the Social Security system faces a financing crisis and that the government can avert the crisis only by acting now to cut benefits or to raise taxes. The best conclusion we can draw from the current evidence is that the system is not...