Purpose – This paper investigates the twin deficit hypothesis for Ghana in view of the persistent co-movement between the budget deficit (BD) and current account deficit (CAD) over the past three decades.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses annual data for the period 1980-2014 and...

Blanchard develops four main arguments concerning the costs of public debt when safe interest rates are low.First, the current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time is more the historical norm than the exception. If the future is like...

Using an extended data set of EU countries ranging from 1971-2006 and relevant econometric methods, we investigate the economic, political, and institutional determinants of government deficits in the EU. The results show a strong opportunistic behaviour of policymakers which leads to political...

This paper formulates a dynamic Random Coefficient Model (RCM) to consider a set of popular determinants of public deficits in the EU-15 over the period 1971-2006, both at a country-specific level and from a population-wide perspective. Although the extent of government deficits and debt has...

We use a newly available dataset of euro area quarterly national accounts fiscal data and construct multivariate, state-space mixed-frequencies models for the government deficit, revenue and expenditure in order to assess its information content and its potential use for fiscal forecasting and...

Budget credibility, or the ability of governments to accurately forecast macro-fiscal variables, is crucial for effective public finance management. Fiscal marksmanship analysis captures the extent of errors in the budgetary forecasting. The fiscal rules can determine fiscal marksmanship, as...

The existing high budget deficit in Tanzanian economy has created an immense concern among economic policy analysts. The study investigates whether budget deficits crowd out or crowd in private investment in Tanzania, using annual data covering the period from 1970 to 2012. Using the Johansen...

In spite of natural resource endowment and recent growth performance, many countries in sub Saharan Africa still face substantial internal and external constraints. The internal constraint can be adequately captured by the fiscal balance, while the external constraint can be captured by the...

The concept of fiscal imbalance is familiar to economists but less so to policymakers, politicians, and the public. Yet understanding this concept is essential to rational discussion of government financial health. This paper provides a primer on government fiscal imbalance.The material is not...