Under the Stability and Growth Pact, countries are committed to achieving medium-term budget positions of “close to balance or in surplus”. The rationale for this commitment is that such budgetary positions would allow for the full working of the built-in stabilizers without triggering the...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government’s finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...

There is a well-established methodology for measuring the effects of economic policy in a model that is `causal' or backward-looking. In this paper a complementary methodology is described for the case in which the model is `non-causal' or forward-looking. The methodology is then applied to an...