Budget reform in OECD member countries: Common trends

Jón R. Blöndal

OECD Journal on Budgeting, 2003, vol. 2, issue 4, 7-25

Abstract: From the early 1990s, the fiscal position of OECD member countries improved steadily each year, from a deficit of 5% of GDP for member countries as whole in 1993 to a perfect balance in the year 2000, i.e. neither a deficit nor a surplus. In 2001, member countries experienced a deficit of 1% of GDP. Table 1 depicts the general government financial balances of selected OECD member countries. This goes to show the historical pattern in member countries: achieving fiscal consolidation is a slow process and successes in fiscal consolidation can quickly dissipate. A very short time ago, several OECD member countries believed that they were on a long-term track for fiscal surpluses; the era of deficits had been overcome. This did not turn out to be the case; surpluses turned out to be a very short-lived phenomenon for many countries.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/budget-v2-art20-en (text/html)
Full text available to READ online. PDF download available to OECD iLibrary subscribers.

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:oec:govkaa:5lmqcr2k18xw

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in OECD Journal on Budgeting from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().