During the past decade, the formulation of fiscal policy has been increasingly founded on medium-term considerations associated with public debt and economic efficiency. In this regard, this paper, and the ones by Olivier Blanchard and Edward Gramlich in the same Working Paper Series, considers...

This paper discusses several aspects of the medium-term orientation of OECD countries' economic policies in the 1980s, concentrating on monetary and fiscal instruments. The developments that led to the adoption of such a "medium-term strategy", and the apparent analytical rationale for it, are...