In this paper we develop a comprehensive short-term fiscal forecasting system of use for the real-time monitoring of the Spanish government's borrowing requirement. Spain has been at the centre of the recent European sovereign debt crisis, not least because of sizeable failures in meeting public...

The study looks at primary expenditure developments in the euro area, its three largest members and four “macro-imbalances” countries for the period 1999-2009. It compares actual expenditure trends with those that would have prevailed if countries had followed neutral policies based on...

Carlos Mulas-Granados, Jorge Onrubia and Javier Salinas-Jiménez investigate the role played by fiscal institutions in the new EU member states that joined in 2004 and in 2007 in the period from 1993 to 2004. They find that budgetary institutions – whose main features are summed up with...