This recession is different. The balance sheets of consumers, companies and banks are under pressure. The private sector seeks to reduce its debt and this counteracts the Keynesian stimulus more than what the usual flow calculations would suggest. There is no doubt that the deleveraging of banks...

From the second quarter of 2009, global economic activity began to show signs of recovery after the recession caused by the subprime crisis. However, the optimism of late 2009 has given way to greater caution on the speed of the recovery, particularly in developed countries. This marks a second...

There is quite a bit of confusion in the policy circles, in the academic circles and also in the markets regarding the international economic situation unleashed by the 2007-2008 crisis. And, as there is so much confusion, the economic policy responses have been largely inconsistent, not only in...

This study examines the Russian public finance system. It provides a description of the main fiscal reforms introduced by the Government from the moment of the USSR dissolution, which enabled a reduction in the economy’s dependency on nonrenewable resources. The study presents the fiscal...

While Keynes can be considered the true father of the “unorthodox” monetary policies introduced by the Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve, these policies also provide the test of their efficacy that Keynes called for. They suggest that Keynes’s Treatise optimism was misplaced, and that...

Many people think that the European Union is about the creation of the single market. It is not. After hundreds of years of internal wars and millions of deaths, of tyrannies playing on nationalism and division, we tried to build a different, united Europe. Although they are extremely relevant,...

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. The recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies. In contrast, we show, conditioning on a...

This paper examines why fiscal policy is procyclical in developing as well as developed countries. We introduce the concept of fiscal transparency into a model of retrospective voting, in which a political agency problem between voters and politicians generates a procyclical bias in government...

Aufgrund der seit langem geführten Debatte um das Für und Wider der Nutzung des Politikinstruments der Staatsverschuldung wissen wir recht viel darüber, was Experten (z. B. Finanzpolitiker/ -wissenschaftler) von Haushaltskonsolidierung, Deficit-Spending oder Verschuldungsgrenzen halten....

This paper assesses the generational stance of fiscal policy in Denmark. The results suggest that if current fiscal policy remains unchanged, the growth-adjusted lifetime net tax payments of future generations would be about 50 per cent higher than those paid by current newborns. It is found...