This paper reviews the first five years of experience with the working of the EMU framework for fiscal policy in EMU. It is argued that the balance with the fiscal framework of EMU so far is mixed. The EMU framework has contributed to avoid large fiscal imbalances in EU Member States and has...

The present paper provides a broad review of these issues, based on findings in the literature and our own recent analytical work. Section 2 presents a bird's eye view of the history of the downfall of fiscal discretion in favour of fiscal rules and how this has shaped fiscal coordination in...

How should the fiscal policy process of the Member States of the EU be designed? This question is presently the subject of lively discussion among policy-makers and economists alike. The debate has been fuelled by the recent controversy concerning the budgetary positions of Germany and France,...

The Stability and Growth Pact is under fire. Problems have appeared in sticking to the rules. Proposals to reform the Pact or ditch it altogether abound. But is the Pact a flawed fiscal rule? Against established criteria for an ideal fiscal rule, its design and compliance mechanisms fare...

In current practice, changes in the cyclically-adjusted budget balance (CAB) are generally interpreted as reflecting the effort of discretionary fiscal policy. This paper shows that such an interpretation is not a sufficiently accurate description of the behaviour of fiscal policy, and, in some...

This paper analyses non-Keynesian effects in fiscal consolidations in the EU. The analysis is carried out both ex-post, i.e. by looking at the emergence of expansionary consolidations in the past and at their characteristics, and ex-ante, i.e. by simulating with the European Commission QUEST...

The jointly optimal monetary and fiscal policy mix in a multi-sector New Keynesian model with sectoral government spending and productivity shocks entails a separation of roles: Sectoral government spending optimally adjusts to sectoral output gaps and inflation rates---a policy supported by...

This paper offers an alternative to the view that budgetary decisions are incremental because they are complex, extensive, and conflicted. Our model interprets incrementalism as the result of a legislative political strategy in response to interest group politics and economic conditions....

In a monetary union time inconsistency provides the rationale for central bank conservativeness and against the coordination of national fiscal policies. We show that this result is based on the implicit assumption of exogenous labor markets and that, once wage setters' behavior is explicitly...