The 2012-13 Budget, which provides for an increase in taxes of $ 39 billion and a reduction in expenditures of $ 7 billion, is strongly contractionary, reducing aggregate demand by about 2 per cent. The government deserves praise for starting the process of fiscal consolidation in a possible...

We nowcast the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lock-down measures in the UK and then analyse the distributional and budgetary effects of the estimated individual income shocks, distinguishing between the effects of automatic stabilisers and those of the emergency policy...