Published in late 2017, the Italian medium-term fiscal plan aims to achieve structural balanceby 2020, although concrete, high-quality measures to meet the target are yet to be specified.This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion by (i) assessing spending patterns to identifyareas for...

Published in late 2017, the Italian medium-term fiscal plan aims to achieve structural balance by 2020, although concrete, high-quality measures to meet the target are yet to be specified. This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion by (i) assessing spending patterns to identify areas for...

We study the properties of the IMF-WEO estimates of real-time output gaps for countries in the euro area as well as the determinants of their revisions over 1994-2017. The analysis shows that staff typically saw economies as operating below their potential. In real time, output gaps tend to have...