An international crisis of 2008 – 2009, ever growing debt challenges in Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal in 2010 prompted the Government of the Russian Federation to revise the approach to the policy of irresponsible build-up of government expenses and obligations. A trend to curb budget...

This paper deals with the issues of the Russia's federal budget in 2008. The authors focused on the general characteristics of the RF budget system, execution of the federal budget in 2008, analysis of collection of main taxes, expenditures, and assesment of budget parameters without regard to...

The President of the State Audit Office of Hungary (SAO), in his capacity as a member of the Fiscal Council, will rely on the knowledge gathered by the auditors during their on-site audits aimed at the establishment of the opinion of the SAO on the budget appropriation bill, and in the course of...

In 2001, Chile was one of the first countries in the world to adopt a structural balance fiscal rule. This paper provides the foundations of the choice of the rule, its methodological design and its initial estimates for the period 1987-2000. The paper also includes a discussion about the use of...

In this paper we analyze how the availability of credit influences the relationship between government size as a proxy for fiscal stabilization policy and the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations in a sample of advanced OECD countries. Interpreting relatively low loan-tovalue ratios as an...

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model. While fiscal policy accounts for 12 to 20 percent of output variance at business cycle frequencies, the anticipated component hardly matters for...

This paper undertakes a normative investigation of the quantitative properties of optimal tax smoothing in a business cycle model with state contingent debt, capital-skill complementarity, endogenous skill formation and stochastic shocks to public consumption as well as total factor and capital...

Does the state of the business cycle matter for the effects of fiscal policy shocks on GDP? This study analyses quarterly German data from 1976 to 2009 in a threshold SVAR, expanding the SVAR approach by Blanchard and Perotti (2002). In a linear benchmark SVAR, the analysis finds that hiking...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...