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...

The United States faces challenging budgetary prospects, as do most other OECD countries. The federal budget deficit widened considerably during the recession, reaching about 10% of GDP in both 2009 and 2010, reflecting the operation of automatic stabilizers and the policy response to the...

This paper presents a simulation model of the main budget aggregates of federal, provincial and territorial governments in Canada. The general approach is to use a cyclical indicator (output gap), estimate the sensitivity of government revenue and expenditure to this cyclical indicator using...

Performance of fiscal policy, while good in international comparison, is not sufficient to prepare for future ageing-related spending increases. Subject to macroeconomic developments, the pace of consolidation could be more ambitious than currently planned, with a view to reducing the debt...

Although Canada remains in an advantageous fiscal position relative to many other OECD countries as the global economy recovers from the 2008/09 recession, the deterioration in the country’s public finances has been substantial. Years of spending increases above trend economic growth have led...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between the volatility of government consumption and country size. Using a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000 the main findings of our empirical analysis suggest that: 1) smaller countries have more volatile non-discretionary and...

This paper examines the effect of economic crises on structural unemployment using an Autoregressive Distributed Lags model and accounting for the role of institutional settings. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 30 OECD economies from 1970 to 2008, we found that downturns have, on average, a...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on output in the euro area. For this purpose we develop a DSGE Fiscal Model with endogenous government bond yields to assess the impact of different fiscal policy shocks on output, its components and on government debt. The simulations suggest...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between the volatility of government consumption and country size. Using a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000 the main findings of our empirical analysis suggest that: 1) smaller countries have more volatile non-discretionary and...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on output in the euro area. For this purpose we develop a DSGE Fiscal Model with endogenous government bond yields to assess the impact of different fiscal policy shocks on output, its components and on government debt. The simulations suggest...