Revisiting fiscal sustainability: panel cointegration and structural breaks in OECD countries
Antonio Afonso and
Joao Jalles
No 1465, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank
Abstract:
We assess the sustainability of public finances in OECD countries, over the period 1970-2010, using unit root and cointegration analysis, both country and panel based, controlling for endogenous breaks. Results notably show: lack of cointegration – absence of sustainability – between government revenues and expenditures for most countries (except for Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and UK); improvements of the primary balance after past worsening in debt ratios for Australia, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands and the UK; Granger causality from government debt to the primary balance for 12 countries (suggesting the existence of Ricardian regimes). Overall, fiscal policy has been less sustainable for several countries, and panel data results corroborate the time-series findings. JEL Classification: C32, E62, H62, H63
Keywords: breaks; causality; Debt; fiscal regimes; FMOLS; panel cointegration; primary balance; stationarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1465.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Revisiting fiscal sustainability: panel cointegration and structural breaks in OECD countries (2012) 
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:ecb:ecbwps:20121465
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().