EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Fallacy of Fiscal Discipline

Paolo Canofari, Alessandro Piergallini and Giovanni Piersanti

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Fiscal discipline is commonly evaluated on the basis of the debt-GDP ratio, which exhibits a stock variable measured relative to a flow variable. This way of monitoring debt solvency is arguably not consistent with transversality conditions obtained from optimizing macroeconomic frameworks. In this paper we consider a wealth-based sustainability index of government debt policy derived from a baseline endogenous growth model. We calculate the index from 1999 onwards for countries in which the after-growth real interest rate is positive, consistently with the theoretical setup. Results are radically different from common wisdom. We show that the fiscal position is sustainable for both Germany and Italy, and strongly unsustainable for both Japan and France. Policy implications of our findings are discussed.

Keywords: Fiscal Discipline; Financial Wealth; Sustainability Indicators. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E60 E62 H60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/88427/1/MPRA_paper_88427.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: THE FALLACY OF FISCAL DISCIPLINE (2020) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:88427

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:88427