Reforms of fiscal institutions and fiscal rules are motivated by several objectives: strengthening fiscal solvency and sustainability, contributing to macroeconomic stabilization, and making fiscal policy more resilient to government corruption and private-sector lobby. These objectives are...

Fiscal authorities impose fiscal rules to achieve goals such as debt sustainability, avoiding fiscal procyclicality, and improving macroeconomic stability. Assessing the effectiveness of fiscal rules requires the construction of a counterfactual scenario depicting the situation in the absence of...

This paper reviews the design and operation of the Chilean fiscal rule in the past 30 years. Using different empirical approaches, we assess its impact on fiscal procyclicality, public debt, and public investment. While there has been substantial progress in building a modern institutional...

Studying the modern economic histories of the ten largest countries in South America and Mexico teaches us the lack of fiscal discipline has been at the root of most of the region's macroeconomic instability. The lack of fiscal discipline, however, takes various forms not measured in the primary...