Search

This book examines legal limitations on government deficit and debt and its impact on the ability of nations to provide services to their residents. It studies constitutional and statutory limitations, as well as those imposed by international treaties and other instruments, including those of both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The book contains a general report examining the fiscal rules that govern the budgets and expenditures of nation states. The general report is followed by a special report which covers the limits imposed by the European Union and by the smaller group of countries constituting the Eurozone. Ten national reports, describing the limits in their respective countries, form the basis of the general report. These countries include eight members of the European Union (five of which use the Euro and three of which do not), one other European state and one non-European state. The reports include two countries in which constitutional “debtbrakes” limit national deficit and debt.

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

One of the most striking macroeconomic developments during the last three decades is the rise and persistence of large fiscal deficits in a number of countries. Despite recent major fiscal reforms around the world, many countries suffer from recurrent large fiscal imbalances that often reflect lack of fiscal discipline. Why do some countries have recurrent fiscal deficit or volatility problems, while others do not? What factors are most important in explaining cross-country variation in fiscal outcomes? How are they related to growth or inflation? This book presents new, rigorous, theoretical and empirical studies on these fiscal issues, and highlights social polarization as an essential organizing principle in a political economy approach. Also, it discusses how institutional constraints may favourably affect fiscal dynamics in the presence of social polarization.

This book considers the implications for the dynamics of the exchange rate and private financial wealth. In a model in which fiscal imbalances are allowed to change the level of domestic public indebtedness. The analysis raises the possibility of an initial appreciation followed by a depreciation and a final exchange rate appreciation. It also highlights the importance that adjustments in the stock of privately-held financial assets have for the determination and speed of medium-run effects of shocks to the economy.