In 2009, just before the full outbreak of the global financial crisis, Olivier Blanchard (2009) published an article giving a favourable appraisal of the state of macroeconomics. He came to this verdict on the basis that, after a long period of fierce theoretical debate, the discipline had...

We explore the underlying determinants of the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and tax and social security reform using the Global Fiscal Model (GFM). We show that the planning horizon of consumers, access to financial markets, and the elasticity of labor supply, as well as the...

This paper proposes a tractable framework to analyze fiscal space and the dynamics of government debt, with a possibly binding zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint. Without the ZLB, a greater primary deficit unambiguously raises debt. However, debt need not explode: When R G – φ, where φ is...

We explore the underlying determinants of the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy and tax and social security reform using the IMF's Global Fiscal Model (GFM). We show that the planning horizon of consumers, access to financial markets, and the elasticity of labor supply, as well as the...

Rather than stabilising aggregate demand, discretionary fiscal policy tends to amplify cyclical fluctuations of output. The commonly accepted reasons are political economy and uncertainty. In the EU, the pro-cyclical nature of discretionary fiscal policy has also been associated with the...

Cyclically induced changes in taxes and government expenditures which tend to stabilise aggregate output are called automatic stabilisers. Using a small macro model, this paper reviews alternative methods of measuring the smoothing power of automatic stabilisers and discusses their relationship...

We reply to the critics who contributed the other papers in the same issue of this journal. In the first part of the article, we indicate those remarks addressed to us, which we deem inappropriate to answer. The second part deals with the remarks we find useful to answer, which relate to money,...

December 2011 was a critical month for the Euro currency credibility within the Euro Zone. This is because for the latest 5 years of economic and financial crisis ardent economic and political debates are still trying to sort out the sequels of this recession. Within this context, this paper...

This paper explores the political economy of fiscal adjustment. It begins with an examination of the evidence for, and sources of, ‘deficit bias', including political and governance factors, public attitudes, the role of financial markets and imprecision about which debt targets should be...

This paper investigates the determinants of fiscal policy behavior and its time-varying volatility, using panel data for a broad set of advanced and emerging market economies during the period 1990–2012. The empirical results show that discretionary fiscal policy is influenced by policy...