Fiscal Rules for the Western Balkans

Edith Kikoni, Sanja Madzarevic-Sujster, Tim Irwin and Charl Jooste

No 8990, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Policy toward fiscal rules is an important issue in the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia). According to a rough estimate, the countries with rules (all but North Macedonia) have complied with their debt and overall-deficit rules a little more than half the time. An online survey, conducted for this paper, suggests that public understanding of the rules is limited, which may reduce the political pressure for compliance. To get debt down to prudent levels, Albania and Montenegro will need a strong commitment to complying with their fiscal rules and will often have to do more than their deficit rules require. The following principles should guide future policy toward fiscal rules: more emphasis should be given to ensuring that fiscal rules are widely understood and enjoy the support of a broad range of stakeholders; policy toward the rules should be consistent with accession to the European Union, but the rules should be simpler than the European Union's and the debt limits lower; limits in rules should not be mistaken for targets; and public financial management should be improved to support the implementation of rules.

Keywords: Macroeconomics and Economic Growth; Economic Policy; Institutions and Governance; Fiscal&Monetary Policy; Macro-Fiscal Policy; Public Sector Economics; Public Finance Decentralization and Poverty Reduction; Economic Adjustment and Lending; Public Financial Management; Inflation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/99248156 ... -Western-Balkans.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:wbk:wbrwps:8990

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().