Fiscal sustainability and public debt management

Budget Deficit in a Growing Economy and Impossibility of Fiscal Collapse: A Continuous Time Analysis.

Using a continuous time dynamic model of growing economy we will show the following results.

1) When people derive utility from their money holding (or government bond holding) along with their consumption, a budget deficit is essential to achieve and maintain full employment under stable prices or inflation in a growing economy.

2) If we take into account that government spending due to budget deficits increases financial assets held by the private sector, and then consumption will occur from assets in addition to consumption from income, even when the interest rate on government bonds is higher than the real economic growth rate, the ratio of government debt to GDP can not diverge and the divergence is naturally prevented by mild inflation. The required inflation rate is such that the interest rate of the government bonds is smaller than the weighted average of the rate of return on capital and the nominal growth rate. Since the interest rate of the government bonds is usually considered smaller than the rate of return on capital, this is not a very demanding requirement.

Thus, we need not worry at all about the accumulation of government debt or about the divergence of the debt to GDP ratio, which is often taken as an indicator of fiscal collapse.

Are the European Commission’s forecasts of public finances better than those of national governments?

The academic literature in the past has frequently highlighted that the European Commission (EC) tends to provide more accurate public finance forecasts compared with national governments, thanks to its neutrality. The recent conflicts regarding the excessive deficit procedure with Romania and Italy and rule of law with Hungary and Poland raises the question of whether such conclusions are still binding. Therefore, we analysed a panel of forecasts submitted by the national governments with an annual update of Convergence programmes and corresponding EC predictions.
Our dataset contains predictions of the general government deficit, revenues and expenditures for EU27 economies and the United Kingdom in the years 2014–2019. First, the analysis shows no meaningful discrepancies between both estimates when the horizon is set at the current year. Forecasts for the next year have equal accuracy in the case of government revenues and expenditures. However, the EC performs worse in the case of the final deficit. Second, cross-country effects are present, but the accuracy is different mainly in the very small economies, that is, the Baltic countries, Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg. Amongst the more populated states, the EC outperforms the Slovakian and
Denmark governments but has worse performance than the Irish, Portuguese and Spanish governments. We also do not see evidence of any political bias in the forecasts

Fiscal Sustainability HypothesisTest in Central and Eastern Europe: A Panel Data Perspective

This paper assesses the fiscal sustainability hypothesis for 10 Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) between 1997 and 2019. The study adopts very recent panel econometric techniques which accounts for issues of structural breaks and cross-sectional dependence in the data generating process to examine the cointegration between government revenue and expenditures. Preliminary results show that revenues and expenditures do not have a long-run relationship and hence a rejection of the sustainability hypothesis. As a next step, we discriminate between structural and cyclical components of revenues and expenditures in order to place emphasis on the structural component. We argue that the structural component of fiscal variables represents the actual long term behaviour of the policymaker. Further results indicate that structural revenues and expenditures have a long-run relationship however with a slope coefficient less than unity which implies sustain- ability in the weaker sense. At that point, expenditures exceed revenues and if this continues for a long time the government may find it difficult to market its debts in the long run. This result suggests that the fiscal authorities in CEEC must therefore do more by taking long term actions to counteract the rising fiscal deficit problems.

Fiscal rules as institutional tools for public debt management in theEuropean Union Member States

This paper aims to assess the impact of the second-generation numerical fiscal rules on the effectiveness of public debt management in the Member States of the European Union. The research was conducted using dynamic panel models on a sample of 27 EU Member States over the period 2008–2021. The effectiveness of public debt management was determined by the level of public debt servicing costs, considering not only the impact of the quality of numerical fiscal rules on interest payments, but also other factors influenced by these rules, such as the quality of fiscal policy, the solvency of public finances and the quality of institutional governance. The motivation for this topic was to evaluate the effectiveness of the second-generation numerical fiscal rules following the changes made to their design in the
context of the reconstruction of the EU fiscal surveillance system after the global economic and financial crisis of 2008–2010. The research has found that strong numerical fiscal rules improve the effectiveness of public debt management. In addition, stable fiscal policy and higher solvency of public finances, as well as political stability and the absence of violence, are conducive to lower public debt servicing costs. This paper enriches the literature by extending it with a new approach to fiscal rules, highlighting their multifaceted impact on the quality of public debt management.