Government Debt in EMU Countries

We investigate the sustainability of fiscal policy in a set of 19 European Monetary Union (EMU) countries over the period 1970-2016. Panel unit root tests in the presence of cross-section dependence show that the Government debt series is stationary, indicating that the solvency condition would be satisfied for the EMU-19 countries. This implies the effectiveness of the austerity measures implemented by member countries. Moreover, Markov-switching models estimates show that for 12 selected countries two different regimes exist, with statistically different coefficients across states. For all these countries, the mean of government debt in the more recent years (state 2) is incredibly higher than the mean of the 1970s (state 1)