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The presented paper contributes to the current state of discussion about the effects of fiscal policy on economic activity in three key points. It focuses on the effects of fiscal policy on poverty and social exclusion instead of on broad measures of economic performance, the analysis is performed on the regional level of some EU national economies and it focuses on possible asymmetric impacts according to the level of the economic performance of the regions regarding the national levels. The results show that fiscal restrictions, both expenditure and income-oriented, have significant negative impacts on both poverty and social exclusion. Especially as far as social exclusion is concerned the impacts on the already underperforming regions seem to be even more profound. When poverty is considered as a measure of inequality instead of social exclusion then revenue-oriented fiscal restrictions seem relatively more harmful than expenditure-oriented fiscal consolidations as far as the underperforming regions are concerned.

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This paper presents a statistical analysis of the relationship between economic performance and competitiveness indicators to address the question of the extent to which competitiveness indicators provideuseful information when assessing economic performance. The analysis was performed on various examples of African economies. The possible relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators were examined by extending a basic relationship between economic performance per capita and investment by competitiveness indicators. The models were estimated by means of an Arellano-Bond estimator. The authors detected many statistically significant relationships between economic performance and competitiveness indicators in the cases of both the whole sample and specifically middle-income economies. However, in the case of low-income economies there are no discernible relationships between economic performance and the information included in the competitiveness indicators. The paper contributes to the analysis of the economic performance of African economies, for which the empirical evaluation of possible links between economic performance and competitiveness indicators is altogether missing.