The paper looks at the determinants of fiscal adjustments as reflected in the primary surplus of countries. Our conjecture is that governments will usually find it more attractive to pursue fiscal adjustments in a situation of relatively high growth, but based on a simple stylized model of...

A key element of the European reform agenda is to simplify the EU fiscal governance framework by moving towards a single debt anchor and a single operational indicator as the basis for formulating fiscal targets and assessing compliance. This paper puts forward an in-depth analysis of two...

We compute government spending multipliers for the Euro Area (EA) contingent on the interestgrowth differential, the so-called r-g. Whether the fiscal shock occurs when r-g is positive or negative matters for the size of the multiplier. Median estimates vary conditional on the specification, but...

We estimate government spending multipliers in demand- and supply-driven recessions for the Euro Area. Multipliers in a moderately demand-driven recession are 2-3 times larger than in a moderately supply-driven recession, with the difference between multipliers being non-zero with very high...