Spain’s government has introduced ambitious consolidation measures, which should yield a sizeable improvement in discretionary fiscal efforts. Should budgetary outcomes fall short of targets, the government should stand ready to introduce further measures, as announced. Such measures could...

Die Transformationsländer Mittel- und Osteuropas (MOE) stecken in der Zwickmühle. Einerseits zwingt der Wettkampf um international knappes Kapital möglicherweise zu Steuersenkungen, die zu Einnahmeausfällen führen. Andererseits werden gerade in Zeiten der Transformation staatliche Einnahmen...

High public debt combined with low capacities of the state to raise taxes and to support markets can put even developed countries into turmoil. However, the existing political economy literature of state capacity, pioneered by Besley and Persson (2009), does not investigate the interaction of...

This paper characterizes the shape of the Laffer curve for consumption tax analytically, considering (i) the functional form of utility and (ii) the use of tax revenue in a neoclassical general equilibrium model. The tax revenue curve for consumption tax cannot be hump-shaped if the utility...

We examine the long-run impact of fiscal policy on economic growth under the conditions of an economic and monetary union (EMU). The analysis is based on the neoclassical growth model of a small (in economic terms) open economy in an EMU. The core assumptions are perfect capital mobility, which...

This study aims to analyse the discretionary fiscal policy of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia for the period 2003-2015 using the structural budget balance (SBB). The SBB considers the permanent component of oil revenue and therefore clearly defines the discretionary fiscal position and the...

Rather than stabilising aggregate demand, discretionary fiscal policy tends to amplify cyclical fluctuations of output. The commonly accepted reasons are political economy and uncertainty. In the EU, the pro-cyclical nature of discretionary fiscal policy has also been associated with the...

This paper analyses the impact of fiscal rules on different public spending categories, namely public expenditure and investment, at the subnational level in Europe. Building on the notion of the deficit bias, we suspect that in the presence of fiscal rules, politicians have an incentive to...

This paper introduces a dataset that gathers information on whether and how Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have complied with or deviated from implemented fiscal rules. It provides annual data on fiscal rules for 14 LAC countries from 2000 to 2020, and it considers the design features of...