The global financial and economic crisis has placed a significant strain on public finances in many economies. Since sound public finances are crucial for price and financial stability and for economic growth, concerns about rising debt commitments have led to a renewed interest in the analysis...

The financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession created unprecedented federal budget deficits in recent years. In fact, these events, combined with subsequent slow growth and two continuing unfunded wars, have resulted in a national debt that is out of control by all meaningful measures....

This paper discusses an alternative route to a balanced budget, namely through debt control. Two models are compared: the debt brake which has been used in Switzerland since 2003 and the debt limitation model proposed by Compact for America. The paper concludes that the former, while apparently...

Congress has expressed interest, one way or the other, in a balanced-budget requirement for the past six decades. Yet despite numerous attempts, the legislative body has never passed a constitutional balanced-budget amendment. Most of the analysis of why we don't yet have a constitutional...

There have been many attempts at solving the problem of determining the “fundamental value” of the credit spread of a government bond. This is particularly important in the case of Eurozone, where the ECB intervention on the government bonds' market is allowed only if the “spread” paid...

The European Union's constitutional balanced-budget amendment, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), dictates that EU member states keep their budget deficits within three percent of GDP and that government debt be kept at or below 60 percent of GDP. After 20 years, unintended consequences of the...

In this paper we propose a new methodology to improve the estimation of structural budget balances in Slovakia. Major innovations compared to currently used methods are in using more robust output gap estimates, inclusion of pensions in the analysis, imposing consistency between various gap...

This paper assesses debt sustainability in Guatemala. Debt stability has been achieved at very low expenditure levels, at the expense of adequate provisioning of public goods and services and a widening gap in social development and infrastructure. Since fiscal outcomes are not independent from...

Purpose - This paper aims to assess the fiscal sustainability in Egypt during the period 1990-2018 using deficit accounts (DA) approach. It also tries to investigate the possibility of applying generational accounts (GA) in Egypt as a new approach to assess fiscal sustainability....

This paper revisits the fiscal sustainability condition proposed by Domar (1944). The Domar condition is derived from the government budget constraint and thus focuses on the supply side of the government bond. By considering the demand for the government bond, this paper finds that public debt...