The sovereign debt problems in European countries have increased the interest in fiscal watchdogs. This paper discusses the world's oldest fiscal watchdog, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). CPB was founded directly after World War II. It has built a reputation of...

We study cointegrating relationships among fiscal variables and output and use them to introduce a new measure of the government's fiscal position. In the US since World War II, we find that the primary surplus-GDP ratio and the government debt-GDP ratio are nonstationary, which invalidates...