n 1992, President Bush proposed legislation intended to speed up the recovery from the 1990-91 recession. Congress rejected this proposal for countercyclical fiscal policy stimulus. In early 1993 President Clinton proposed his own stimulus package, but Congress rejected this proposal too. Many reasons were given for deciding against these two discretionary fiscal policy proposals, but perhaps t...

The recent debate over dollarization has been more focused on the motives of the idea than in analyzing the proposal more formally. Here we attempt to prove a very simple point that should be considered as the hardest lesson ever learnt by emergent economies: no stability is achieved without fiscal sustainability. The purpose of devaluation has been usually to find a way to finance a deficit. O...

The federal government faces a daunting fiscal outlook, which makes the budgetary impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act even more important. The official Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis indicates modest deficit reduction over the next ten years and beyond. We examine the underpinnings of the CBO's projection and conclude that it is built on a shaky foundation of om...

Increasing the independence of a central bank from political influence, although ex-ante socially beneficial and initially successful in reducing inflation, would ultimately fail to lower inflation permanently. The smaller anticipated policy distortions implemented by a more independent central bank would induce the fiscal authority to decrease current distortions by increasing the deficit. Ove...

Recent developments in the Bulgarian economy bring into question the validity of the twin deficit hypothesis. This paper analyses the theoretical foundations of and alternative explanations for this hypothesis and uses different econometric approaches to test its validity on a sample of the Bulgarian data. A Granger causality test suggests the existence of dual causality between the fiscal and ...

This paper focuses on long-run estimation of the price equation in the United States for the period of 1973Q1-2011Q3. It was found the Sargent and Wallace view that an easy monetary policy today will result in a lower price level over the long run when debt and deficit exist is true for the United Sates. Furthermore, it was found that, over the long run, a higher real exchange rate, government ...

This paper studies the evolution of European fiscal policies and the attempts at budgetary consolidation through three periods: the pre-Maastricht phase (to 1991); the run up to monetary union (1992-97), and finally the stability pact phase (1998 onwards). Using three separate indicators – the probability of undertaking a consolidation, the degree to which it is sustained, and the probability o...

Generational policy is a fundamental aspect of a nation's fiscal affairs. The policy involves redistributing resources across generations and allocating to particular generations the burden of paying the government's bills. This chapter of the second edition of The Handbook of Public Economics shows how generational policy works, how it's measured, and how much it matters to virtual as well as ...

This chapter examines the effects of fiscal consolidation —tax hikes and government spending cuts—on economic activity. Based on a historical analysis of fiscal consolidation in advanced economies, and on simulations of the IMF’s Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal Model (GIMF), it finds that fiscal consolidation typically reduces output and raises unemployment in the short term. At the same ...

We analyze the effect of the fiscal structure upon the trade-off between inflation and output stabilization in presence of technological shocks and deficit or debt objectives in a DGE model with nominal inertia. The model is calibrated to reproduce the main long-run and business cycle features of European economies, and it integrates a rich menu of fiscal variables, including fiscal rules. Thes...