One of the often discussed negative aspects of the Stability and Growth Pact is the rigidity of its deficit rule. Several reform proposals aim currently at alleviating the rule in order to allow the automatic stabilizers to operate freely. However, such a reform is likely to cause even further...

In this paper we examine factors that make some governments revert to procyclical fiscal policies despite the standard normative prescription being to conduct fiscal policy countercyclically. In order to avoid the pitfalls of the two-step methods previous studies have typically used we used a...

Aim of this paper is to assess empirically the sustainability of budgetary policy in Poland in Years 1992-2005. Our results show that structural surplus did not respond in a way that would stabilize the level of public debt, thus not fulfilling the condition of sustainability. It also showed...