Tax receipts surged between 2005 and 2007 in many OECD countries, resulting in significant improvements in headline fiscal positions. As a consequence, pressures for tax cuts and for public spending increases have emerged. In the past, responding to such demands has permanently weakened budget...

The financial crisis and economic downturn are going to weigh on fiscal positions in OECD countries over the short to medium-term, both through the operation of automatic stabilisers and the enactment of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages. However, the strategic policy options facing OECD...

Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

Overall, health outcomes in China have improved tremendously over the past three decades, especially thanks to the reduction in some traditional infectious diseases. However, death rates from chronic diseases have been on the rise, not least owing to changes in life styles and deteriorating...

The aim of this paper is to assess the ability of social spending to smooth output shocks and to provide stabilization. The results show that overall social spending is able to smooth about 16 percent of a shock to GDP. Among its subcategories, social spending devoted to Old Age and Unemployment...

The world is recovering from the worst crisis since the Great Depression, leaving a strong and lasting impact on Member countries’ public finances. This paper analyses how sub-central governments (SCG) are affected and how fiscal policy has reacted in the first months after the outbreak of the...

Measuring cyclically-adjusted budget balances for OECD countries An important tool in the analysis of fiscal policy is the distinction between structural and cyclical components of the budget balance. This paper describes work undertaken to re-estimate and re-specify the elasticities underlying...

This paper assesses how and in what circumstances, fiscal consolidations are affected by monetary conditions, using data covering 24 OECD countries over the past 25 years, Focusing on fiscal consolidation “episodes”, it is found that these tend to occur when large budget deficits threaten...

The ability of discretionary fiscal policy to affect economic activity following shocks depends on how private agents react. This paper re-investigates the extent of possible offsetting private saving behaviour to fiscal policy changes. The results suggest that the private saving offset is...

This paper describes a number of alternative medium-term scenarios for the OECD economies and related policy stimulations using the OECD world model INTERLINK. The starting point of the analysis is a reference scenario to 2000 featuring a general recovery of the OECD economies to steady state...