Among the Great Recession costs there was the adoption of fiscal policies, generally bounded to increase government debt. In the Oecd area, however, the resulting debt jump was not simply due to counter-cyclical discretion, mostly because of two reasons: the first is that such policies were not...

In this paper we suggest a new measure of discretionary government spending for OECD countries over the period 1980-2011. To identify the components of discretionary expenditure, we use the volatility and persistence properties of the expenditure series. Discretionary policy cannot be inertial...