The reform of the European fiscal rules came into force on 30 April 2024. The new rules, like the former ones, impose a depressive bias on domestic fiscal policies, leaving Member States' no fiscal room for manoeuvre. At the same time, the European Pillar of Social Rights sets ambitious targets...

This study presents evidence on the effect of fiscal policies on poverty and inequality in Ghana for the 2017 fiscal year based on the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) assess- ment framework. Also, the CEQ framework was used to simulate the short-term distri- butional consequences ('morning-after'...

The extent of social and economic issues has an impact on current society, and ways of solving them reflect not only on social policy but also on results of economic policies. The paper aims to evaluate the effects of social protection expenditures/benefits in relation to selected socio-economic...

This paper explores the link between default risk and fiscal procyclicality. We show that countries with higher sovereign risk have a more procyclical fiscal expenditure policy, which is driven mostly by transfers. We build a small open economy model with income inequality, social transfers, and...

We contribute to the long-standing debate on the Italian North-South divide by assessing the impact of public spending on social infrastructure - including education, healthcare, childcare and social assistance - on the gender employment gap over the last two decades, using a PSVAR analysis....

In many OECD countries, the majority of social spending is financed from earmarked revenues, and a large share of revenues earmarked for any type of government spending is used for social purposes. Tying revenue sources to specific expenditure categories has a number of potential advantages and...

In this paper, we use a static fiscal incidence analysis model to evaluate the poverty and inequality impacts of using fiscal policy to finance expanded social spending in South Africa. We assess three methods to enhance the social protection system's equity objectives: increasing the size...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal policy in Grenada. Using data from the 2017-2018 Living Conditions and Household Budgets Survey and following the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) analysis framework, we estimate the effects of fiscal policy interventions on inequality and...

This paper assesses the impact of distinct types of financial crises on social protection spending using a panel of 105 countries over the period 1991-2019. The findings show that spending on social protection increases when financial crises strike, mainly in the aftermath of banking crises....

Persistent inequalities between women and men in income, unpaid work, paid work and other dimensions disadvantage women, undermine human rights and damage economic prosperity. Despite the challenges in measuring economic resources at the individual level in a consistent manner across countries,...

Spending elasticities measure the reaction of different government spending components to the business cycle. They are important inputs for fiscal forecasts, and they are particularly relevant in the context of European Union (EU) fiscal rules, as elasticity estimates enter the estimation of...