Search results for " fiscal"
showing 10 items of 271 documents
Political risks: the “red shift” in debt sustainability analysis
2020
Political stability and economic policy uncertainty can be key determinants of sovereign debt dynamics, and we show how they can be incorporated in debt sustainability analysis. We distinguish between short-term ambiguity and long-term uncertainty about political risk factors, and using a combination of narrative scenarios and calibrated probabilistic scenarios we obtain a comprehensive heatmap of high-risk debt dynamics. We use Italy as an interesting case study and demonstrate a “red shift” in the assessment of vulnerabilities when accounting for political risks. Ignoring these risks can lead to excessive optimism and wrong decisions.
IN TEMA DI MISURE CAUTELARI IN MATERIA FISCALE
2014
Is an Increase of the Fiscal Budget at EMU level Desirable?
2005
The birth of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has determined the creation of a common currency, the Euro, but unlike other monetary unions, the EMU does not have a central fiscal authority. The role of fiscal policy is left to the responsibility of the governments of the EMU member States. The new architecture modifies the assignment of the instruments to the objectives, especially those of stabilization. The loss of the sovereignty of monetary policy and exchange rate control by the individual member states has determined the inability to use two important instruments of insurance against the risks of shocks. Moreover, the Treaty of Maastricht and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) could…
Discretionary vs nondiscretionary in fiscal mechanism – non-automatic fiscal stabilisers vs automatic fiscal stabilisers
2015
The goal of the present study is to increase the intelligibility of macroeconomic phenomena triggered by governmental intervention in economy by means of fiscal policies. During cyclical movements, fiscal policy can play an important role in order to help stabilise the economy. But discretionary policy usually implies implementation lags and is not automatically reversed when economic conditions change. In contrast, automatic fiscal stabilisers (SFA) ensure a prompter, and self-correcting fiscal response. The present study aims to tackle the topic of discretionary vs nondiscretionary characteristic of fiscal stabilisers (SF). In this context, the scope of the research undertaking is to laun…
How best to measure discretionary fiscal policy? Assessing its impact on private spending
2013
We develop a novel empirical approach to assess the effect of discretionary fiscal policy on private spending consisting of three stages: 1) extract the discretionary component of fiscal policy by estimating a fiscal policy rule; 2) use the residuals of the first-stage regression to investigate the existence of crowding-in and/or crowding-out effects both in the short and the medium term; and 3) condition the response of private spending on a set of country characteristics. We find that an expansion in discretionary fiscal policy boosts growth in the short term, but is detrimental in the medium term. In addition, the empirical findings suggest that the effect of discretionary fiscal policy …
Fiscal adjustments and income inequality: a first assessment
2012
Using a statistical approach to identify fiscal adjustments, we find that fiscal consolidation appears to shorten the income gap. Fiscal austerity plans that succeed in bringing public debt to a sustainable path seem to be more likely to reduce inequality. Expansionary fiscal adjustments are particularly important to promote changes in the income distribution.
Assessing long-term fiscal developments : a new approach
2011
We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue – responsiveness and persistence–, a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers, we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal deterioration (improvement). Drawing on quarterly data, we estimate recursively these components within a system of government revenue and spending equations using a Three-Stage Least Square method for eight European Union countries plus the US. The results suggest that significant changes in the fiscal stance (including those related to the current crisis) are reflected in the estimates of persistence …
Fiscal Devaluations in EMU
2013
2013SummaryWe use a small open economy general equilibrium model to analyse the effects of a fiscal devalua-tion in an EMU country. The model has been calibrated for the Spanish economy, which is a goodexample of the advantages of a change in the tax mix given that its tax system shows a positive biasin the ratio of social security contributions over consumption taxes. The preliminary empirical evi-dence for European countries shows that this bias was negatively correlated with the current accountbalance in the expansionary years leading up to the 2009 crisis, a period when many EMU membersaccumulated large external imbalances. Our simulation results point to significant positive effects of…
The Analysis on the Cyclical Behaviour of Fiscal Policy in the EU Member States
2013
Abstract This paper deals with the topic of cyclicality of fiscal policy. The main purpose of this paper is to determine the cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy in the EU member states, using historical time series for all the European countries during the period between 1995- 2011. The results pointed out that the procyclical fiscal policies are a feature of developing countries and the countercyclical and acyclical fiscal policies are a feature of developed counties.
Can fiscal decentralization alleviate government consumption volatility?
2016
We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization leads to lower government consumption volatility. This result holds for the sub-sample of advanced economies, while it is not confirmed for those less-developed. This mechanism seems to work mainly through a lower volatility of the non-discretionary spending, which typically belongs to the central government’s policy. We also confirm existing findings according to which country…