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This paper proposes an empirical framework that distinguishes voluntary from involuntary compliance with fiscal deficit targets on the basis of economic, institutional, and political factors. The framework is applied to Spain's Autonomous Communities (regions) over the period 2002-2015. Fiscal noncompliance among Spain's regions has shown to be persistent. It increases with the size of growth forecast errors and the extent to which fiscal targets are tightened, factors not fully under the control of regional governments. Non-compliance also tends to increase during election years, when vertical fiscal imbalances accentuate, and market financing costs subside. Strong fiscal rules have not shown any significant impact in containing fiscal non-compliance. Reducing fiscal non-compliance in multilevel governance systems such as the one in Spain requires a comprehensive assessment of intergovernmental fiscal arrangements that looks beyond rules-based frameworks by ensuring enforcement procedures are politically credible.

In this paper we provide short- and long-run tax buoyancy estimates for 107 countries (distributed between advanced, emerging and low-income) for the period 1980–2014. By means of Fully-Modified OLS and (Pooled) Mean Group estimators, we find that: i) for advanced economies both long-run and short-run buoyancies are not different from one; ii) long run tax buoyancy exceeds one in the case of CIT for advanced economies, PIT and SSC in emerging markets, and TGS for low income countries, iii) in advanced countries (emerging market economies) CIT (CIT and TGS) buoyancy is larger during contractions than during times of economic expansions; iv) both trade openness and human capital increase buoyancy while inflation and output volatility decrease it.