In recent years, many countries have adopted Fiscal Responsibility Laws to strengthen fiscal institutions and promote fiscal discipline in a credible, predictable and transparent manner. Still, results on the effectiveness of these laws remain tentative. In this paper, we test empirically...

This paper studies why public finances in Sweden have remained very strong during the current financial crisis. Unlike almost all other European countries, Sweden has had budget surpluses and a government debt ratio around 40 percent of GDP during the recent crisis. We attribute this to two...

Fiscal councils now exist in a number of countries.  This paper first considers the extent of deficit bias, potential explanations for it, and how independent institutions could help reduce it.  Are fiscal councils complements to or substitutes for fiscal rules, and why do none at  present...

This paper attempts to gauge the effects of various fiscal and monetary policy rules on macroeconomic outcomes in the euro area. It consists of two major parts – a historical assessment and an assessment based on an extended scenario until 2030 – and it builds on the ECB-BASE –a...

We present an accessible narrative of the Turkish economy since its great 2001 crisis. We broadly survey economic developments and pay particular attention to monetary policy. The data suggests that the Central Bank of Turkey was a strong inflation targeter early in this period but began to pay...

We present an accessible narrative of the Turkish economy since its great 2001 crisis. We broadly survey economic developments and pay particular attention to monetary policy. The data suggests that the Central Bank of Turkey was a strong inflation targeter early in this period but began to pay...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unconstrained by hard financial limits. Not only can they issue their own currency to pay public debt denominated in their own currency,...

We study the evolution of the response of fiscal policy to monetary policy shocks in the EMU in the light of two important events: the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1992 and the introduction of the EMU in 1999. Based on impulse responses from a panel VAR, we find that fiscal and monetary...