Suchergebnisse

Indicators of government activity must be carefully designed to be relevant, credible and accountable. Frustration with reform pressures suggests that measures of policy activity are not providing accurate information. In fact, indicators of product or labour market regulation fail to measure structural reform as they focus on cross-country comparisons rather than on progress with reform over time. I use the novel EU Semester approach recommending EU Member States to implement reforms and their annual follow-up in the National Reform Programme to develop some indicators of how reform plans are actually implemented. This indicator might be useful for checking progress with policy, but also for empirical studies testing what drives or blocks reform in different policy domains.

Los Bancos Centrales de los países pertenecientes al G7 dieron un giro hacia políticas menos convencionales a raíz de las consecuencias de la crisis financiera, cuando se enfrentaron a la desaceleración económica, la inestabilidad financiera y las dificultades fiscales. Este cambio ha finalizado un período de políticas monetarias de larga duración basadas en normas que se iniciaron a mediados de los años ochenta. Expongo que los considerables riesgos económicos, políticos y financieros añaden una presión al apoyo continuo de un régimen monetario. Los bancos centrales pueden verse obligados a adoptar políticas sobre la marcha sin ninguna opción de restablecer aquellas opciones más adelante. Demuestro con modelos de duración –en una muestra de economías industrializadas y emergentes de 1970 a 2012– que el giro de políticas hacia las metas de inflación ocurrió despu'es de episodios con alta inflación y deuda pública, lo que refleja el amplio apoyo a las políticas monetarias (y fiscales) orientadas hacia la estabilidad. A rasgos generales los cambios en los regímenes monetarios se producen después de una crisis. La inflación alta supone que los bancos centrales aspiren a políticas monetarias activas, mientras que renuncian a esas mismas políticas al iniciarse una crisis fiscal o financiera. ; Central banks in G7 countries shifted to unconventional policy measures in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, when faced with economic slack, financial instability and fiscal trouble. This shift ended a spell of rules-based time consistent monetary policy that started in the mid-1980s. I argue that substantial economic, political and financial risks put pressures on the continued support for a monetary regime. Central banks may be forced to adopt policies with no option to reset those options later on. I demonstrate with duration models – on a sample of industrialized and emerging economies from 1970 to 2012 – that the policy switch to inflation targeting happened after episodes with high inflation and public debt, reflecting broad support for stability-oriented monetary (and fiscal) policy. More generally, changes in monetary regimes occur after a crisis. High inflation makes central banks pursue active monetary policies, while they forsake those same policies in the wake of fiscal or financial crises.

The fiscal policy rule implicit in the Stability and Growth Pact, has been rationalised as a way to ensure that national fiscal policies remain sustainable within the EU, thereby endorsing the independence of the ECB. We empirically examine the sustainability of European fiscal policies over the period 1970-2001. The intertemporal government budget constraint provides a test based on the cointegration relation between government revenues, expenditures and interest payments. Sustainability is analysed at both the national level and for a European panel. Results show that European fiscal policy has been sustainable overall, yet national experiences differ considerably.

I reconsider the short-term effects of fiscal policy when both government spending and taxes are allowed to respond to the level of public debt. I embed the long-term government budget constraint in a VAR, and apply this common trends model to US quarterly data. The results overturn some widely held beliefs on fiscal policy effects. The main finding is that expansionary fiscal policy has contractionary effects on output and inflation. Ricardian effects may dominate when fiscal expansions are expected to be adjusted by future tax rises or spending cuts. The evidence supports RBC models with distortionary taxation. We can discard some alternative interpretations that are based on monetary policy reactions or supply-side effects.

This paper characterises rules-based fiscal policy setting. Basically, we translate a standard monetary policy rule into a simple fiscal policy rule. We then infer on fiscal policymakers' reaction coefficients by testing the rule with GMM. Interaction is also tested directly by the inclusion of monetary policy setting. Our results qualify existing evidence on systematic fiscal policy in two respects. First, fiscal policy usually stabilises public debt. And there is indeed substantial interaction between fiscal and monetary policy via the debt channel. Second, sustainability is achieved with a 'stop-go? cycle of consolidation. Consolidation does not come at the cost of less cyclical stabilisation unless debt ratios are high.

Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts. We improve accuracy by combining the forecasts of both private and public agencies for Italy over the period 1993-2012. A weighted combined forecast of the deficit/ ratio is superior to any single forecast. Deficits are hard to predict due to shifting economic conditions and political events. We test and compare predictive accuracy over time and although a weighted combined forecast is robust to breaks, there is no significant improvement over a simple RW model.

Highly centralised countries like Italy and Spain have devolved fiscal power to regions in an asymmetric way. Some well-off regions get transfers that turn them into net recipients of the fiscal system. We demonstrate in a political economy model of fiscal federalism that, in centralised countries, side-payments are used to compensate regions that are set back by the fiscal system and can credibly threaten to secede. Compensation blocks political negotiation on alternative—more efficient—fiscal systems. We study two regions, Valle d'Aosta in Italy and País Vasco in Spain, as an example.

The global financial crisis rapidly spread across borders and financial markets, and also distressed EU bond markets. The crisis did not hit all markets in the same way. We measure the strength and direction of linkages between 16 EU sovereign bond markets using a factor-augmented version of the VAR model in Diebold and Yilmaz (2009). We then provide a novel test for contagion by applying the multivariate structural break test of Qu and Perron (2007) on this FAVAR detecting significant sudden changes in shock transmission. Results indicate substantial spillover, especially between EMU countries. Differences in bilateral linkages are due to a combination of fiscal trouble and a large banking sector, as Belgium, Italy and Spain are central to shock transmission during the financial crisis. Contagion has been a rather rare phenomenon limited to a few well defined moments of uncertainty on financial assistance packages for Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Most of the frequent surges in market co-movement are driven by larger shocks rather than by contagion.