EU Member countries have shown different degrees of ambition to reach a budget position of "close to balance or in surplus". Differences in ambition can only partly be explained by the relative size of cyclical safety mar­gins or differences in the number of votes in the ECOFIN Council. It is...

After a brief introduction dealing with critical opinions of some economists on the European austerity policy, the authors point out that austerity as a means of achieving fiscal consolidation and financial stability is applied when the fiscal domain is weak. After analyzing the effects of the...

In this paper, we estimate the aggregate and sectoral fiscal multipliers of EU Structural Investment (ESI) Funds and of public investment at the EU level. We complement these results with a specific application to the case of Slovenia. We first analyze aggregate data and find large and...

Using the model derived by Bajo-Rubio (2014), this paper estimates government budget balance-consistent growth rates for the euro area countries. A comparison of these estimates to their actual growth rates indicates that most of these countries are growing at rates that are very similar to...

European Union funds flowing into budgets of public sector organisations of its member states should be additional to their nationally funded expenditures. To investigate this additionality principle systematically, we develop a new empirical method. Our main hypothesis is that some of the...