The debt brake in the eyes of the German population

Bernd Hayo and Florian Neumeier ()

International Economics and Economic Policy, 2016, vol. 13, issue 1, 139-159

Abstract: In response to the recent sovereign debt crisis, the member states of the European Union agreed to enact balanced budget rules in their national legislation. However, little is known about the public’s opinion of balanced budget rules. To fill this gap, we conducted a survey among 2,000 representatively chosen German citizens. Our findings suggest that 61 % of the German population supports the debt brake, whereas only 8 % oppose it. However, approval rates differ notably among various subgroups of the population. The debt brake enjoys greater support among high-income earners and among those well-informed about the future costs of deficit spending. People who do not trust politicians would like to see the government’s hands tied even more tightly. Opinions about the debt brake also differ markedly across the supporters of different political parties. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

Keywords: Debt brake; Balanced budget rule; European fiscal compact; Survey; Germany; E62; H31; H62; H63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10368-015-0323-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Debt Brake in the Eyes of the German Population (2014)
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:kap:iecepo:v:13:y:2016:i:1:p:139-159

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10368/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10368-015-0323-1

Access Statistics for this article

International Economics and Economic Policy is currently edited by Paul J.J. Welfens, Holger C. Wolf, Christian Pierdzioch and Christian Richter

More articles in International Economics and Economic Policy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().