Italy’s policy of fiscal consolidation and growth-friendly structural reforms has substantially improved its economic prospects, but the adverse sentiment that the country has faced in the sovereign bond market over the past years has deep roots. It reflects lingering anxieties over the euro...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether efforts to eliminate the budget deficits in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, as it has been suggested by Troika (European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank), will delay the economic growth of these...

If women have different economic preferences than men, then female economic and political empowerment is likely to change policy and household decisions, and in turn macroeconomic outcomes. We test the hypothesis that female enfranchisement leads to lower government budget deficits due gender...

Debates over economic policy tend to be enormously confused. It is often the case that even high-level officials and well-known economists seem ignorant of basic accounting identities. This leads them to make claims that literally do not add up. This seems to be especially common in the case of...

The main aim of the article is to present the relationships between public debt and economic growth in the European Union in the period 2000–2010. The article consists of two parts. The first part deals with theoretical analysis of the relationships between public debt and economic...

This paper examines the implications of changing the tax treatment of employment-based health coverage. It discusses the current tax treatment of health coverage and various proposals to change the tax treatment of health coverage. The implications of changing the tax treatment are also...

Per effetto della crisi economica che si è realizzata con particolare intensità nel corso del 2009, molte economie avanzate hanno intrapreso percorsi di risanamento fiscale. Nell'ambito di tali misure un ruolo non trascurabile è rappresentato dagli interventi di riduzione della spesa per il...

The purpose of this paper is to briefly explain the current Spanish legal framework to curb the debt and deficit introduced after the constitutional reform of September 2011, before the ‘Six Pack’ and the ‘Fiscal Compact’ (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance or TSCG) were...

The paper argues in favor of significant budget deficits based on the understanding that the expansion of the 1990s was fueled by a great build-up of debt, and that this would eventually give way to a severe recession unless offset by a strong fiscal stimulus. In 2001, with the total government...

Generational policy is a fundamental aspect of a nation's fiscal affairs. The policy involves redistributing resources across generations and allocating to particular generations the burden of paying the government's bills. This chapter in Volume 4 of the Handbook of Public Economics shows how...