Political determinants of the fiscal sustainability: evidence from six individual developed countries.

2007

This paper aims at assessing the fiscal sustainability and its political determinants in six countries, namely France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States. First, using the recent sustainability approach of Bohn (1998) based on fiscal reaction function, econometric findings using OLS reveal a positive response of the primary surplus to changes in debt in several countries. In other words, fiscal policy is sustainable in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, but not in Germany and Greece. Second, by introducing political dummy variables, we test the electoral budget cycle, the partisan cycle and the government coalition theories. We find the presence…