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The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that a common fiscal policy, designed to support the euro currency, has some significant drawbacks. The greatest danger is the possibility of leveling the tax burden in all countries. This leveling of the tax is to the disadvantage of countries in Eastern Europe, in principle, countries poorly endowed with capital, that use a lax fiscal policy (Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) to attract foreign investment from rich countries of the European Union. In addition, common fiscal policy can lead to a higher degree of centralization of budgetary expenditures in the European Union.

This paper derives and estimates rules for fiscal policy that prescribe the optimal response to changes in unemployment and debt. We combine the reduced form model of the economy from a linear VAR with a non-linear welfare function and obtain analytic solutions for optimal policy. The variables in our reduced form model –growth, unemployment, primary surplus– have a natural rate that cannot be affected by policy. Policy can only reduce fluctuations around these natural rates. Our welfare function contains future GDP and unemployment, the relative weights of which determine the optimal response. The optimal policy rule demands an immediate and large policy response that is procyclical to growth shocks and countercyclical to unemployment shocks. This result holds true when the weight of unemployment in the welfare function is reduced to zero. The rule currently followed by policy makers responds procyclically to both growth and unemployment shocks, and does so much slower than the optimal rule, leading to significant welfare losses.

Sweden is a front-runner in defining intermediate targets for fiscal policy (fiscal rules) as well as in setting up an independent fiscal council to monitor and comment on developments. Swedish public finances are among the most sound in the OECD having been able to consolidate public finances and ensure fiscal sustainability, and they have maintained room for fiscal manoeuvre also during the financial crisis. This paper takes a closer look at the Swedish case as the stepping stone for a more general discussion of how to set intermediate targets for fiscal policy and the role fiscal councils may have in strengthening political accountability and thus ultimately credibility of fiscal policy. The Swedish fiscal framework is compared to the fiscal compact for EU countries, and it is argued that it has a number of desirable features.

This paper investigates the macroeconomic implications of alternative tax regimes. For this purpose, a one-sector general equilibrium model is constructed in which heterogeneous agents differ in productivity and holdings of capital in the sense of incurring transaction costs for participating in the capital market. A Cobb-Douglas production function is employed that can capture the capital-skill complementarity effect and the difference in productivities of the skilled and unskilled workers. With regards to fiscal policy experiments, this paper examines tax structures where a permanent reduction in each of the three main tax instruments namely, consumption, labour and capital income tax is compensated by a permanent increase in one of the remaining two policy instruments such that the government budget constraint is tax revenue neutral. The government levies taxes on consumption, labour income and capital income in order to finance its only activity, government consumption. Next, the model economy is calibrated to the Greek economy to reflect the great ratios over 1960:1-2005:4 and then, it studies the long-run, welfare and transitional effects of the undertaken analysis. The sensitivity analysis shows that the quantitative and qualitative findings are quite robust.

Macroeconomists often prefer monetary policy to fiscal policy as a tool to stabilize business cycles. Fiscal policy is typically only effective with a lag, and results in permanent deficits with higher nominal interest rates and distortionary taxes. In addition, a high marginal propensity to save out of temporary tax cuts might result in low fiscal multipliers with empirical estimates often below 1 (see Ramey (2011b) and Barro and Redlick (2011)). The zero lower bound on nominal interest rates, however, constrains the effectiveness of monetary policy during liquidity traps. Large stocks of sovereign debt limit the scope of fiscal stimulus, and inflated central bank balance sheets constrain asset-purchase programs as forms of unconventional monetary policy. The unclear effectiveness of several measures of monetary policy - both conventional and unconventional - after the 2008-2009 Financial Crisis calls for alternative mechanisms to increase aggregate demand and hence promote growth. This issue is especially relevant for several major developed economies that, years after the end of the Great Recession in the United States, are still experiencing sluggish growth. In particular, southern European countries are still facing the contractionary effects of the austerity measures they implemented to abate their debt-to-GDP ratios during the Euro sovereign-debt crisis. Many economists argue structural reforms are necessary to improve the competitiveness of these countries in the long run, but promoting a short-run increase in aggregate demand to jump start the economy is also a compelling objective for policy makers. The conundrum the Euro area has faced since the start of the Great Recession is to generate inflation and ultimately stimulate consumption and economic growth in a setting in which traditional monetary policy measures were not viable and governments could not generate growth with fiscal stimulus because of their large debt-to-GDP ratios. This challenge was so compelling that in his Marjolin lecture on February 4, 2016, the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, asserted that "there are forces in the global economy that are conspiring to hold inflation down." (Draghi, 2016).

Defence date: 26 March 2007 ; Examining board: Prof. Giancarlo Corsetti, EUI, Supervisor ; Prof. Morten Ravn, EUI ; Dr. Jeffrey Campbell, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago ; Prof. Roel Beetsma, University of Amsterdam ; There is little doubt that fiscal policy plays an important role in business cycle fluctuations; however, the ability of fiscal policy measure to work as a countercyclical stimulus has recently been questioned (see Taylor, 2000), in light of the efficiency and transparency of monetary policy interventions. Far from postulating a definitive answer to the debate, the objective of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, through their interaction with the consumption behaviour of private agents. The fundamental contribution of this thesis is the introduction of different forms of households' heterogeneity in the analysis of the effects of government expenditure shocks and tax cuts.

This thesis deals with selected topics in fiscal policy. The first part examines the relationship between fiscal decentralization and certain outcomes, one being the amount of trust citizens have in their government, the other being economic efficiency. The second part looks into the challenge of governments to develop fiscal systems, or policy reforms, that generate sufficient revenues to deal with long-run government budget challenges and promote economic growth at the same time.

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves under rising public debt ratios. It is found that both Germany and Spain generally exhibit a positive relationship between government revenues and debt. Using Markov-switching techniques, we show that both countries underwent a change in policy behavior in the light of rising debt/output ratios at the end of the 1990s. Interestingly, this change in policy behavior differs in its characteristics across the two countries and seems to be non-permanent in the case of Germany.

Fiscal policy represents one of the most important components of economic policy and as such it should be treated in its context.For this there are at least two reasons:First, economic policy defines the goals and criteria of fiscal policy in order to assess its contribution to the implementation of economic policies, andSecond, defining the connection between the objectives and instruments, theory of economic policy explains the process of fulfilling the objectives of economic policy, part of which process is fiscal policy itself. Therefore, in the following, in a quite direct manner, we will address the interdependence between economic policy and fiscal policy.The word policy, in everyday life is used to clarify the principles on which various activities run, in order to realize the goals set by the designated authorities by determining the holders of those activities, their size as well as means by which those goals should be realized.In order to achieve prosperity and political stability, national governments aim at achieving economic equilibrium. Kosovo is one of the last countries in Europe to transition to a market economy. The transition process has begun from a very difficult starting point.During the years after the war, a symbolic economic growth occurred, which has been attributed mainly to remittances, investments in infrastructure and privatization. Investments, despite continuous growth, are considered insufficient to boost domestic production.This pattern of growth has not been able to meet the development needs of the state and failed to translate into a better standard of living for citizens, given that neither unemployment nor poverty are reduced. (The Progress Report on Kosovo, European Commission 2011).

This paper argues that any assessment on the intentional stance of fiscal policy should be based upon all the information available to policymakers at the time of fiscal planning. In particular, real-time data on the discretionary fiscal policy "instrument", the structural primary balance, should be used in the estimation of fiscal policy reaction functions. In fact, the ex-post realization of discretionary fiscal measures may end up to be drastically different from what was planned by fiscal authorities in the budget law. When fiscal policy rules are estimated on real-time data, our results indicate that OECD countries often planned a counter-cyclical fiscal stance, especially during economic expansions, whereas conventional findings based on revised data point towards pro-cyclicality. This finding calls into question the effectiveness of discretionary fiscal policies to fine tune the business cycle, as (pro-cyclical) actual outcomes tend to deviate from (counter-cyclical) fiscal plans. Furthermore, we test whether threshold effects might be at play in the reaction of fiscal policy to the economic cycle and to public debt accumulation. It emerges that the intended cyclical behavior of fiscal policy is characterized by two regimes, and that the switch between them is likely to occur when output is close to its equilibrium level. On the other hand, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect.

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s.We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves under rising public debt ratios. It is found that both Germany and Spain generally exhibit a positive relationship between government revenues and debt. Using Markov-switching techniques, we show that both countries underwent a change in policy behavior in the light of rising debt/output ratios at the end of the 1990s. Interestingly, this change in policy behavior differs in its characteristics across the two countries and seems to be non-permanent in the case of Germany.

In HANK, we show that fiscal policy is an appropriate macroeconomic stabilization tool at the ZLB. Fiscal policy achieves the same macroeconomic aggregates and the same welfare as hypothetically unconstrained monetary policy by replicating its transmission mechanism. Consumption taxes and labor taxes replicate the effects of monetary policy through the intertemporal substitution channel. Debt-financed lumpsum transfers and a permanent increase in the government debt level replicate the effects of monetary policy through the redistribution channel.

This paper tests the joint hypotheses that policymakers engage in fiscal policy opportunism and that voters respond by rewarding that opportunism with higher vote margins. Furthermore, it investigates the impact of fiscal illusion on the previous two dimensions. Empirical results, obtained with a sample of 68 countries from 1960 to 2006, reveal that opportunistic measures of expenditures and revenues generate larger winning margins for the incumbent and that the opportunistic manipulation of fiscal policy instruments is larger when the current government is less likely to be reelected. Furthermore, fiscal illusion contributes to the entrenchment of incumbent policymakers in office and promotes opportunistic behaviour. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...

This paper analyzes Germany's fiscal policy position. Half of GDP passes through the hands of government, a high debt to GDP ratio limits the maneuvering, and the revenue sharing mechanism prevents a competitive federalism. Most importantly for the future, the federal finance minister has to pick up the deficits that the social security systems leave behind. Transfers from the public budget to the social security systems are large, and since 1998 the elasticity of transfers to nominal GDP is 4. This trend will intensify in an aging society. All these factors weaken the prospects for reform that Germany must undertake in its taxation and expenditure system in view of the changed international conditions.

This paper assesses the macroeconomic impact of fiscal policy shocks for four key emerging market economies - Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) – using a Bayesian Structural Vector Auto-Regressive (BSVAR) approach, a Sign-Restrictions Vector Auto-Regressive framework and a Panel Vector Auto-Regressive (PVAR) model. To get a deeper understanding of the government's behaviour, we also estimate fiscal policy rules using a Fully Simultaneous System of Equations and analyze the mportance of nonlinearity using a smooth transition (STAR) model. Drawing on quarterly frequency data, we find that government spending shocks have strong Keynesian effects for this group of countries while, in the case of government revenue shocks, a tax hike is harmful for output. This suggests that there is no evidence in favour of 'expansionary fiscal contraction' in the context of emerging economies where spending policies are largely pro-cyclical. Our findings also show that considerations about growth (in the case of China), exchange rate and inflation (for Brazil and Russia) and commodity prices (in India) drive the nonlinear response of fiscal policy to the dynamics of the economy. All in all, our results are consistent with the idea that fiscal policy can be a powerful stabilization tool and can provide an important short-term economic boost for emerging markets, in particular, in the context of severe downturns as in most recent financial turmoil. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia ...