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Artículo de revista ; Against an international background of low tariff barriers, the EU's trade policy has shifted towards attaining bilateral trade agreements that promote the reduction both of non-tariff barriers and of those regulatory barriers that restrict the movement of goods, services, individuals and investment flows, in addition to including provisions relating to the environment, labour markets and intellectual property rights. An example of these "new-generation" agreements is the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) recently negotiated by the EU and Canada, which is in the process of being ratified by the national parliaments. The article describes the general characteristics of new-generation trade agreements, the difficulties posed by their regulatory and wide-ranging nature, and how the CETA has attempted to respond to some of the issues that have proven most controversial for public opinion. The significance of this agreement pertains not only to the economic impact it will have on the European and Canadian economies, but also to how it could act as a model for other agreements with developed countries, including that which the EU and the United Kingdom have to negotiate

El nivel de inversión pública de las economías avanzadas se encuentra en mínimos históricos y muestra una tendencia decreciente al menos desde la década de los ochenta. Hay dos hipótesis principales en la literatura que tratan de explicar este hecho. La hipótesis de la «prevalencia del gasto social» (social dominance) argumenta que se debe a que existen factores estructurales que empujan el gasto social al alza, en particular debido al envejecimiento de la población y las preferencias sociales asociadas, de manera que, puesto que los Gobiernos tienen recursos limitados (y márgenes decrecientes, dadas la situación de estancamiento secular y la acumulación de niveles muy elevados de deuda pública), la inversión pública estaría siendo desplazada de los presupuestos públicos. Una segunda hipótesis señala que la causa de este fenómeno es la existencia de marcos rígidos de reglas fiscales, que en períodos de consolidación fiscal llevan a los decisores públicos a ajustar los gastos de capital, menos rígidos a la baja, pero que en períodos de expansión no generan los incentivos adecuados para que se recuperen unos niveles más elevados de inversión, haciendo permanente una parte importante de la pérdida de los períodos bajistas. En este documento analizamos de manera conjunta la capacidad explicativa de estas dos teorías, y encontramos que ambas son relevantes para entender la dinámica de la inversión pública de las economías avanzadas en las últimas décadas. ; Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the "social dominance hypothesis" claims that this is related to structural factors, given the upward social expenditure trends related to ageing populations and social preferences, and the operation of the government budget constraint (limits to further increase significantly tax revenues and public debt, in a context of secular stagnation). On the other hand, another branch of the literature indicates that too-rigid fiscal rule frameworks cause fiscal retrenchment episodes to hinge heavily on public capital expenditure, which does not recover enough in the subsequent expansion, creating a sort of downward hysteresis behaviour in this budgetary item. In this paper we look jointly at both sets of duelling explanatory factors, and show that both are key to understanding public investment dynamics in advanced economies over the past decades.

We analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. To allow for comparability with previous results on euro area countries and the US, we use a standard structural VAR framework, and study the impact of aggregated and disaggregated government spending and net taxes shocks. In addition, to frame euro area results, we apply the same methodology for the same sample period to US data. We also explore the sensitivity of the provided results to the inclusion of variables aiming at measuring "financial stress" (increases in risk) and "fiscal stress" (sustainability concerns). Analysing US and euro area data with a common methodology provides some interesting insights on the interpretation of fiscal policy shocks