Fiscal sustainability refers to a government's capacity to generate sufficient revenue to cover its expenses and repay its debts without accumulating excessive liabilities or creating new money. Recent observations indicate that Kenya's economic growth has slowed, prompting concerns about its...

This study examines public debt sustainability in the Eurozone by estimating fiscal reaction functions that assess how fiscal balances respond to rising public debt under heterogeneous macroeconomic conditions. Using annual panel data for 20 EU countries from 2000 to 2024, we employ fixed...

This study examines the impact of key governance dimensions on public budget rationalization in Palestine from 2002 to 2023. Utilizing Legitimacy Theory, the research assesses how institutional quality affects fiscal outcomes, including revenues, expenditures, net lending, and budget balance....

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the economic crises in Argentina and Lebanon to derive policy-relevant lessons for the design of IMF-supported adjustment programs in fragile economies. Using a structured comparative case study approach, the study examines crisis dynamics, policy...

Using cross-country data for 167 countries with broad post-World War II coverage and historical extensions to earlier periods, we quantify how deficits, taxes, and civilian spending respond to increases and decreases in military spending. On average, deficit financing dominates: a 1 percent-age...

We provide new evidence on the effects of fiscal consolidation measures on output, unemployment, income inequality and consumer price inflation. To identify causal impacts, we use a narrative-based instrumental variable strategy drawing on historical records of exogenous fiscal changes motivated...

The central contention of this report is that the UK fiscal framework has some desirable features but is not delivering good outcomes. We are in a bad equilibrium. The UK's fiscal framework is based around a set of pass-fail, numerical fiscal rules. The fiscal debate is overly fixated on the...

A reform in the German state of Hesse selectively shifted the responsibility for overseeing and enforcing a balanced budget rule at the municipal level. Oversight was transferred from politically affiliated county administrators to non-political and potentially more impartial fiscal supervisors...

This paper introduces the first narrative-based dataset on fiscal consolidations for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Drawing on staff reports from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during the period 1990-2024 and using an approach assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), the dataset...

Argentina has struggled with persistently high inflation for the past two decades, surpassing 200% in 2023. While there is a broad consensus on the need for fiscal consolidation to curb inflation in the country, the path to disinflation is fraught with challenges. The objective of this paper is...

Several studies have investigated the fiscal sustainability of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. However, country-specific analyses fail to account for common factors and cross-dependence, while a single-panel approach is inadequate due to the region's economic diversity. Building on...

Japan combines the highest public debt ratio among advanced economies with a fiscal framework that has struggled to anchor fiscal policy. As monetary policy normalises and interest rates rise, concerns about debt sustainability have intensified. We assess Japan's debt dynamics using stochastic...

This study explores the relationship between geopolitical risk and fiscal-budgetary stability of countries, focusing on how external instability impacts the dynamics of the budget deficit. Using a dynamic System GMM (Arellano-Bover/Blundell-Bond) model on a panel dataset of 25 OECD member...

In this paper, we analyse the effects on the economies of the European Union and the rest of the world, of several austerity policies implemented by the Southern European countries, i.e., Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. In particular, we simulate the reduction in one point in the government...

Fiscal rules have been shown to support fiscal discipline by improving government budget balances and restraining the growth of debt. However, questions remain about what enhances their effectiveness and how certain conditions help to build the credibility needed for their survival and success....

We study the social and distributional implications of the euro area (EA) sovereign debt crisis in countries that received external financial assistance for macroeconomic adjustments. Combining granular data from about one million survey interviews with households across euro area states carried...

A fiscal rule is economically sensible if it ensures sustainable public finances. The German debt brake does no such thing because it is blind to the two key determinants of fiscal sustainability - interest rates and growth. We therefore propose modelling a reformed German fiscal rule on the...

Widening income disparities, higher corruption and larger informality in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) including Latin America, all with pressing and mounting fiscal problems, have rekindled interest in the empirical analysis of the key factors determining the occurrence...