This paper deals with alternative approaches for deriving adequate budgetary safety margins. We highlight some critical features of the existing EU Commission's methodology and propose an alternative method for assessing the minimal benchmark, i.e. the value of the deficit-to-GDP ratio that...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy on private GDP, inflation and the long-term interest rate in Italy using a structural vector autoregression model. To this end, a database of quarterly cash data for selected fiscal variables for the period 1982:1-2004:4 is constructed, largely...