The Italian Great Recession has a double-dip pattern. After the start of the global financial crisis, Italy experienced a second serious recession in 2011 because of the sovereign debt crisis. The reaction of Italian governments was mild at the beginning and more convinced since the start of the...

The purpose of this article is to identify changes in the development of national fiscal rules in response to the crisis, in terms of the new economic governance in the EU. In-depth analysis was carried out on the example of the three countries that have the highest Fiscal Rule Strength Index,...

During the last three decades there has been an almost continuous undermining of the public interest by private interests operating either outside or inside Greek public administration. The result of this infiltration has been a gradual loss of bureaucratic autonomy to pursue the public...

Employing data from a representative survey conducted in Germany, this paper examines public preferences for the size and composition of government expenditure. We focus on public attitudes toward taxes, public debt incurrence, and public spending in six different policy areas. Our findings...

Recent theoretical literature related high public debt to the presence of rent-seeking activities by the government (Bataglini and Coate, 2008, Yared, 2010). This paper tests the hypothesis that higher public corruption leads to higher public debt using a panel of OECD countries. The estimates,...

Austerity is a concept that is often used in the public debate. It refers to fiscal policy measures that reduce government spending and raise taxes for the purposes of closing a government budget deficit. This paper analyzes the concept in the context of the current European economic crisis and...

We look at the effect of exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, taking into account the effect of underlying political conditions. We present a model where strong politics (defined as policymakers facing longer political horizon and higher cohesion) are associated with better fiscal...

In this paper, we study the impact of fragmented politics on public debt-in particular, between two consecutive legislative elections. Using data for 92 advanced and developing countries during 1975-2015, we find a positive association between political fragmentation and public debt changes....

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between the shadow economy and corruption as determinants of public debt in the Spanish Autonomous Communities. In addition, we construct a Corruption Perception Index for those regions. Our data constitute panel data for the period 2000–2012....

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...