Japan experienced a major change of government in September 2009. It was a remarkable political event, because Japanese politics was dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in almost all the years following the end of World War ll. The new coalition government led by the Democratic Party...

The purpose of this paper is to explain why Japan’s fiscal deficit increased so dramatically in the 1990s and the 2000s. We focus on the role of “stock price targeting” to explain why the fiscal expenditure increased so much. After presenting a simple model to describe government behavior...

Governments around the world have struggled to find the right method of controlling public spending and budget deficits. In recent years, the United States has evaluated policy changes using a ten-year budget window. The use of a multi-year window is intended to capture the future effects of...

This paper examines various aspects of fiscal policy in Slovenia, in particular fiscal consolidation, pension reform, efficiency of government spending and the tax system. It finds that Slovenia belongs to the group of new EU member countries, which have given in the past a high priority to...

Israel’s monetary policy framework is broadly sound. Inflation targeting was introduced in the early 1990s, and low single-digit inflation was established by the end of the decade. However, fast transmission from the exchange rate to inflation means the operational challenges differ somewhat...

While according to the so-called “Brussels-Frankfurt consensus” sound fiscal policies and structural reforms support each other, it is often claimed that the EU fiscal framework, by reducing the budgetary room of manoeuvre and the political capital of governments, may deter reforms. The aim...

The Paper is one of the first attempts to compute cyclical and structural deficits for a set of countries candidate to accession to the EU. Three main results are derived: first, the high deficits observed in candidate countries in recent years have a structural nature. Second, the fiscal stance...

The EU fiscal framework has often been criticized for neglecting a possible trade-off between short-term budgetary objectives and the implementation of reforms that could improve public finances in the long term This concern was reflected in the recent reform of the Stability and Growth Pact,...

Having reached a peak in 2002, Croatia's GDP growth lost momentum thereafter due to restrictive economic policy measures prompted by rising external and internal imbalances. The current account deficits, averaging 6-7% of the country's GDP over the past few years, were primarily the consequence...

One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending --tax expenditures--receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than spending. This paper explores the implications of that classification and illustrates how it can lead...