The paper describes the main transmission channels of the spillovers of national fiscal policies to other countries within the euro area and investigates their magnitude using different models. In the context of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), fiscal spillovers are relevant for the accurate...

This paper analyses both the long and the short-run relation between government expenditure and potential output in EU countries by means of pooled mean group estimation (Pesaran, Shin, and Smith (1999)). Results show that, over a sample comprising EU-15 countries over the 1970-2003 period, it...

We re-examine the conventional view that to be successful, fiscal adjustments should rely on spending cuts and not on tax increases. We apply the Bai-Perron structural break filter instead of ad hoc rules to identify fiscal adjustments and their successfulness in 20 OECD countries. Our results...

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Departing from this issue, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate by using a True Random Effect model the impact of...

Wagner's Law is the first model of public expenditure in the history of public finance. It suggests that during the process of economic development the share of public spending in national income tends to expand (Wagner, 1883). Nevertheless, Peacock and Scott in 2000 wrote a paper entitled...

This paper studies the problems of convergent and divergent tendencies in the functional allocation and structure of public expenditure in the EU Member States and the effect of the Stability and Growth Pact reform of year 2011 on them. The study is based on sigma convergence analysis. The...

We study fiscal spending multipliers of the UK economy using a time-varying parameter factor augmented vector autoregressive (TVP-FAVAR) model. We show that government spending multipliers vary over time and that most of the variation is cyclical: multipliers are typically above one in...

This work provides empirical evidence for a sizeable, statistically significant negative impact of the quality of fiscal institutions on public spending volatility for a panel of 23 EU countries over the 1980–2007 period. The dependent variable is the volatility of discretionary fiscal policy,...

The concept of the "quality of public finances" (QPF) covers many qualitative and structural issues of fiscal policy. This chapter traces the origins of the concept of QPF to the Lisbon Strategy and the subsequent EPC Working Group on "Quality of Public Finances" (2004‐2007). At its core, the...

We study the impact of numerical expenditure rules on the propensity of governments to deviate from expenditure targets in response to surprises in cyclical conditions. Theoretical considerations suggest that due to political fragmentation in the budgetary process expenditure policy might be...