We will study in this paper the relation between public investment, public debt and fiscal rules in the European Union countries. The strict fiscal rules imposed by EU have negatively affected the investments. The decline in public investment in European Union is related to the fiscal rules...

Fiscal consolidation is a traditional concern, we can say at the European institutional level, ratified and gradually taken over by the member countries, implemented through the Stability and Growth Pact, and enshrined in the Treaty of Maastricht, which is part of the permanent bailouts of...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

This paper shows how fiscal policy affects unemployment in a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions and distortionary taxation. The model is estimated using US data that includes labor market flows and distinct fiscal instruments. Several findings stand out. First, unemployment...

The COVID-19 crisis has caused public debt to increase dramatically, which is why the German and European fiscal rules are currently suspended. In addition to the new assessment of the fiscal costs at low interest rates (r g), the discussion on the reintroduction of fiscal rules in Germany and...

The COVID-19 crisis has caused public debt to increase dramatically, which is why the German and European fiscal rules are currently suspended. In addition to the new assessment of the fiscal costs at low interest rates, the discussion on the reintroduction of fiscal rules in Germany and Europe...

The budget dispute between Italy and the European Commission in 2018 gave new impetus for the debate about the reliability of output gap estimation methods and their use for calculating structural budget balances. In this paper we review the main properties of the mainstream approaches and...

Utilising data of the EU28 Member States for the period 1996–2015, this paper confirms the findings of previous studies that the stipulation of fiscal rules reduces fiscal volatility and consequently contributes to macroeconomic stability. Yet, we document that this result only holds for rules...

The current European fiscal framework is highly complex. The multitude of fiscal rules and the discretion in their enforcement precludes an effective oversight and weakens the effectiveness of fiscal rules substantially. Against this background, we present a proposal for a careful refocusing of...

This paper derives a set of policy lessons for Portugal from the new fiscal framework including a fiscal policy council that gradually emerged in Sweden after the deep economic crisis of the early 1990s. By now, Swedish public finances stand out among the strongest in Europe. Recent Swedish...