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The public finances crisis has brought binding fiscal rules proposals back to the forefront. The paper analyses their justifications and specifications, either in a classical or in a Keynesian framework. In the recent period there is no evidence that public deficits were caused by fiscal indiscipline and induced too high interest rates; there is no evidence that economically relevant rules can be designed. The paper provides in analysis of fiscal rules implemented either at country level (like the UK golden rule), or at the EU level (the Stability and Growth Pact). The paper shows that fiscal rules did not work before and during the crisis. The paper discusses the EU project, the "New Fiscal Pact", which risks to paralyse fiscal policies and to prevent economic stabilisation. The priority today is not to strengthen public finance discipline but to question economic developments which make public deficits necessary to support output.

The public finances crisis has brought binding fiscal rules proposals back to the forefront. The paper analyses their justifications and specifications, either in a classical or in a Keynesian framework. In the recent period there is no evidence that public deficits were caused by fiscal indiscipline and induced too high interest rates; there is no evidence that economically relevant rules can be designed. The paper provides in analysis of fiscal rules implemented either at country level (like the UK golden rule), or at the EU level (the Stability and Growth Pact). The paper shows that fiscal rules did not work before and during the crisis. The paper discusses the EU project, the "New Fiscal Pact", which risks to paralyse fiscal policies and to prevent economic stabilisation. The priority today is not to strengthen public finance discipline but to question economic developments which make public deficits necessary to support output.

Publié dans la revue Applied Economics (novembre 2019) : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00036846.2019.1676392 ; In response to increasing debt paths, governments often implement fiscal consolidation programs. This paper studies the impact of these programs on the composition of government spending. System-GMM estimations performed on a sample of 53 developed and emerging countries over 1980-2011 reveal that fiscal consolidations significantly reduce the government investment-to-consumption ratio, i.e. a composition effect. Robust to a wide set of tests, this significantly stronger contraction of government investment with respect to government consumption is at work particularly when debt is high, for spending-based fiscal consolidations, in the low phase of the economic cycle, and following debt and stock market crises. Therefore, in such contexts, fiscal consolidations aimed at short-run stabilization may hurt the economy in the long-run through their detrimental effect on public investment, calling for a reflection upon how they could be re-designed to allow avoiding such undesirable consequences.

Publié dans la revue Applied Economics (novembre 2019) : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00036846.2019.1676392 ; In response to increasing debt paths, governments often implement fiscal consolidation programs. This paper studies the impact of these programs on the composition of government spending. System-GMM estimations performed on a sample of 53 developed and emerging countries over 1980-2011 reveal that fiscal consolidations significantly reduce the government investment-to-consumption ratio, i.e. a composition effect. Robust to a wide set of tests, this significantly stronger contraction of government investment with respect to government consumption is at work particularly when debt is high, for spending-based fiscal consolidations, in the low phase of the economic cycle, and following debt and stock market crises. Therefore, in such contexts, fiscal consolidations aimed at short-run stabilization may hurt the economy in the long-run through their detrimental effect on public investment, calling for a reflection upon how they could be re-designed to allow avoiding such undesirable consequences.

En raison de la crise des dettes publiques, les projets visant à instaurer des règles budgétaires sont revenu au premier plan. Le document analyse leurs justifications et les spécifications proposées, dans un cadre néo-classique, puis dans un cadre keynésien. Il n'y a aucune preuve que, au cours de la dernière période, les déficits publics ont été causés par de l'indiscipline fiscale et induit des taux d'intérêt trop élevés. Aucune des règles proposées n'est économiquement satisfaisante, c'est-à-dire capable d'indiquer la politique optimale face à tous les chocs. Le papier propose une analyse des expériences de règles budgétaires, nationales (comme la règle d'or au Royaume-Uni) ou européenne (comme le Pacte de stabilité et de croissance) ; il montre qu'ils n'ont pas fonctionné avant et pendant la crise. La dernière section discute du projet européen, le "nouveau pacte budgétaire ", qui risque de paralyser les politiques budgétaires et d'empêcher la stabilisation économique. L'urgence aujourd'hui n'est pas d'augmenter la discipline des finances publiques, mais de remettre en question les évolutions économiques qui rendent les déficits publics nécessaires.

En raison de la crise des dettes publiques, les projets visant à instaurer des règles budgétaires sont revenu au premier plan. Le document analyse leurs justifications et les spécifications proposées, dans un cadre néo-classique, puis dans un cadre keynésien. Il n'y a aucune preuve que, au cours de la dernière période, les déficits publics ont été causés par de l'indiscipline fiscale et induit des taux d'intérêt trop élevés. Aucune des règles proposées n'est économiquement satisfaisante, c'est-à-dire capable d'indiquer la politique optimale face à tous les chocs. Le papier propose une analyse des expériences de règles budgétaires, nationales (comme la règle d'or au Royaume-Uni) ou européenne (comme le Pacte de stabilité et de croissance) ; il montre qu'ils n'ont pas fonctionné avant et pendant la crise. La dernière section discute du projet européen, le "nouveau pacte budgétaire ", qui risque de paralyser les politiques budgétaires et d'empêcher la stabilisation économique. L'urgence aujourd'hui n'est pas d'augmenter la discipline des finances publiques, mais de remettre en question les évolutions économiques qui rendent les déficits publics nécessaires.

This paper shows that, contrary to their favourable effect in the EU non-FCC (Former Communist Countries), fiscal rules do not significantly affect fiscal performance in the group of EU FCC. This finding, which may echo differences between FCC and other EU inherited from the Cold War period, is robust when considering various estimation methods, dividing fiscal rules along various dimensions, and using several observed and computed measures of fiscal performance. However, when going beyond the simple presence of fiscal rules, we find that an improvement of the strength of fiscal rules significantly affects fiscal performance in EU FCC, with a magnitude higher than that in EU non-FCC. Our findings are particularly important from the perspective of the future Euro zone and European Union enlargements, which involve former communist countries, and go along with the adoption of various types of fiscal rules.

This paper shows that, contrary to their favourable effect in the EU non-FCC (Former Communist Countries), fiscal rules do not significantly affect fiscal performance in the group of EU FCC. This finding, which may echo differences between FCC and other EU inherited from the Cold War period, is robust when considering various estimation methods, dividing fiscal rules along various dimensions, and using several observed and computed measures of fiscal performance. However, when going beyond the simple presence of fiscal rules, we find that an improvement of the strength of fiscal rules significantly affects fiscal performance in EU FCC, with a magnitude higher than that in EU non-FCC. Our findings are particularly important from the perspective of the future Euro zone and European Union enlargements, which involve former communist countries, and go along with the adoption of various types of fiscal rules.

Numerical simulations of fiscal space in the euro area, based on 12 different situations, point to the large uncertainty surrounding the capacity of Member States to pay back their public debts. Debt sustainability appears to depend crucially on long-term nominal interest rate being lower than nominal growth for a long period. Only in this case do major European countries experience some additional fiscal space. Although the analytics behind this exercise is common knowledge among macroeconomists, it gives an order of the magnitude of fiscal space in the euro area and it confirms that interactions between the ECB and governments are key to escape the public finances consequences of an exogenous global shock like Covid-19.

Numerical simulations of fiscal space in the euro area, based on 12 different situations, point to the large uncertainty surrounding the capacity of Member States to pay back their public debts. Debt sustainability appears to depend crucially on long-term nominal interest rate being lower than nominal growth for a long period. Only in this case do major European countries experience some additional fiscal space. Although the analytics behind this exercise is common knowledge among macroeconomists, it gives an order of the magnitude of fiscal space in the euro area and it confirms that interactions between the ECB and governments are key to escape the public finances consequences of an exogenous global shock like Covid-19.

We consider an innite horizon neoclassical model with a government that (i) balances its budget at each point in time, (ii) needs to nance unavoidable (incompressible) public expenditures, and (iii) further uses a scal rule for the share of variable government spending in output with the purpose of stabilizing the economy. We show that insulating this economy from belief driven uctuations is not possible if the government needs to nance (with distortionary taxes) incompressible public expenditures. In this case, we always have steady state multiplicity (two steady states) and global indeterminacy, while local indeterminacy is also possible. More precisely, even if a suciently procyclical share of the variable government spending component in output is still able to eliminate local indeterminacy, two saddle steady states prevail, so that, depending on expectations, the economy may either converge to the low steady state or to the high steady state. This implies that a regime switching rational expectation equilibrium, where the economy switches between paths converging to the two dierent steady states, easily arises. As expectations inuence long run outcomes, our model is able to generate large and sudden expansions and contractions in response to expectation shocks.

We consider an innite horizon neoclassical model with a government that (i) balances its budget at each point in time, (ii) needs to nance unavoidable (incompressible) public expenditures, and (iii) further uses a scal rule for the share of variable government spending in output with the purpose of stabilizing the economy. We show that insulating this economy from belief driven uctuations is not possible if the government needs to nance (with distortionary taxes) incompressible public expenditures. In this case, we always have steady state multiplicity (two steady states) and global indeterminacy, while local indeterminacy is also possible. More precisely, even if a suciently procyclical share of the variable government spending component in output is still able to eliminate local indeterminacy, two saddle steady states prevail, so that, depending on expectations, the economy may either converge to the low steady state or to the high steady state. This implies that a regime switching rational expectation equilibrium, where the economy switches between paths converging to the two dierent steady states, easily arises. As expectations inuence long run outcomes, our model is able to generate large and sudden expansions and contractions in response to expectation shocks.