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This paper applies the Kydland–Prescott framework of dynamic inconsistency to fiscal policy by considering the trade‐off between output and debt stabilization. In a static framework, commitment to debt stabilization is superior to discretion only when the public debt–GDP ratio is high. Discretion, though, is always inferior to an optimal fiscal rule, which however entails a positive predetermined debt growth. As usual, the introduction of uncertainty determines an additional advantage for discretion. Finally, if dynamic considerations are introduced, the optimal fiscal rule is characterized by positive debt growth in the short run and debt stabilization in the long run.

This paper purports to apply the Kydland-Prescott framework of dynamic inconsistency to the case of fiscal policy, by considering the trade-off between output and debt stabilization. The Government budget constraint provides the link between debt dynamics and the level of activity, influenced by fiscal policy. Contrary to what happens in the monetary policy framework, however, a commitment is not always superior to discretion, even in the absence of uncertainty, but only when the public debt-GDP ratio is sufficiently large. The introduction of uncertainty, as usual, implies a reduction in the net benefit generated by the adoption of a fixed rule.

Il lavoro esamina la relazione fra disuguaglianza e crescita nelle regioni italiane nel periodo 1990-2003. I risultati ottenuti confermano, in primo luogo, la congettura formulata dalla teoria economica più recente per cui una maggiore disuguaglianza nella distribuzione personale dei redditi riduce la crescita reale. L'esame dei diversi possibili meccanismi di influenza della disuguaglianza sulla crescita, inoltre, evidenzia come tanto il canale connesso all'instabilità sociale quanto, soprattutto, quello relativo al razionamento del credito siano rilevanti nello spiegare l'evidenza empirica riscontrata. L'analisi svolta, infine, suggerisce che una diminuzione della disuguaglianza nelle regioni del Sud, connessa all'attuazione di opportune politiche redistributive all'interno dell'area, potrebbe favorire una riduzione del ritardo nello sviluppo economico del Mezzogiorno.

World economies, and especially European ones, have become strongly interconnected in the last decades and a joint modelling is required. We propose here the use of Copulas to build flexible multivariate distributions, since they allow for a rich dependence structure and more flexible marginal distributions that better fit the features of empirical data, such as leptokurtosis. We use our approach to forecast industrial production series in the core EMU countries and we provide evidence that the copula-VAR model outperforms or at worst compares similarly to normal VAR models, keeping the same computational tractability of the latter approach.