We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue - responsiveness and persistence - a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers, we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal...

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal policy discretion on economic activity in the short and medium-term. Using a panel of 132 countries from 1960 to 2008, we find that fiscal policy discretion provides a net stimulus to the economy in the short-run and crowding-in effects are amplified...

We use a Three-Stage Least Square (TSLS) method and a system of equations to recursively estimate two components of fiscal policy - responsiveness and persistence - and to infer about the sources of fiscal deterioration (improvement). The results suggest that (i) government spending exhibits...