Fiscal Discretion in the Czech Republic in 2001-2011: Has It Been Stabilizing?

We survey discretionary measures of Czech fiscal policy in the period 2001-2011 and analyze their episodes and macroeconomic impacts. We use bottom-up and top-down methods to identify fiscal discretion and we compare the results with Kalman filtering. Fiscal discretion is found to be used frequently and to be large in several years. At the same time, the results signal that macroeconomic stabilisation has not been major aim of fiscal discretion measures. For example, in the years of economic recession 2010-2011, the government put emphasis on pro-cyclical consolidation.