Austerity measures have been tested in developing countries for several decades under the pseudo name of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ following the recommendations and under the supervision of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Evidence indicates...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of fiscal policy in a world comprising a set of small open economies, whose driving force is the intergenerational conflict over debt, taxes, and public goods. Subsequent generations of voters choose fiscal policy through repeated elections....

Not much cross-country evidence exists on the time-series behavior of individual fiscal instruments in response to the public debt and to output. To remedy this situation, this study provides a set of detailed estimated fiscal reaction functions (or “fiscal rules”) governing these responses...

This paper looks at some of the key fiscal questions related to Scottish independence, drawing on detailed analysis of household survey data, official data on public spending and revenues, and using a model of the UK and Scotland's public finances over the next half a century. We examine how and...

In this paper, we provide a test of the sustainability of the Spanish government deficit over the period 1850–2000, emphasizing the role played by monetary and fiscal dominance in order to get fiscal solvency. Since the condition of fiscal solvency was satisfied, government deficit would have...

In this paper we evaluate internationally agreed limits on public sector debt and deficits, such as those agreed by the EC countries in the Treaty of Maastricht as preconditions for membership in a monetary union. These fiscal convergence criteria require that general government budget deficits...

Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider three questions: i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? ii) how well have historical debt management policies performed? and iii) how is that performance affected by...

Ireland’s banking crisis, one of the most severe in the OECD area, and the associated economic recession have taken a heavy toll on public finances. Large public deficits have accumulated since 2008 and net public debt, which had been eliminated, has soared once again. The rapid deterioration...

This paper explores the political economy of fiscal adjustment. It begins with an examination of the evidence for, and sources of, ‘deficit bias’, including political and governance factors, public attitudes, the role of financial markets and imprecision about which debt targets should be...