Motivated by the fiscal imbalances in the EU countries in the recent period, this paper analyzes the effect of national fiscal rules on fiscal discipline. Using a careful definition of national fiscal rules combined with a novel measure of fiscal discipline (the Global Financial Performance Index-GFPI), propensity score matching estimations that account for potential endogeneity reveal that fiscal rules significantly improve the GFPI. However, this favorable effect dramatically depends upon the type of fiscal rule and different structural factors. These two features, together with alternative measures of fiscal discipline, are found to be key ingredients that should be taken into account when assessing the effects of fiscal rules on fiscal discipline.

This paper analyzes the relationship between government expenditure, tax on returns to assets, public debt, and growth in an endogenous growth model. Public debt is composed of two components, domestic debt and external debt. We show conditions for existence, uniqueness, and multiplicity of the steady states. More precisely, existence of steady state requires a sufficiently high productivity and a sufficiently low tax on returns to assets. We also provide the effects of an increase in the tax rate on returns to assets on the steady state. In particular, the relation between public spending and the tax rate has a bell shape. Domestic debt unambiguously increases with tax whereas external debt displays an inverted U‐shaped curve. A high tax rate leads to a reallocation of public debt in favor of domestic debt (to the detriment of external debt). The effect of taxation on consumption (and production) also displays a nonlinear pattern when the output elasticity of capital is lower than unity (the effect is monotonously increasing if this elasticity is unity). We also derive the conditions under which a tax increase can boost or reduce the balanced growth rate.

The pandemic crisis constitutes an unprecedented challenge for the European Union and for the Euro Area. Indeed, the European institutional architecture can be viewed as being halfway between an association of sovereign states (like the United Nations) and a politically integrated federation (like the United States). In this original construction, competences on several matters (such as economic, political, social and health issues) are shared at the European level, but also at the national and local levels, in more complex ways than in fully integrated federations. To improve the European Union's resilience to violent external shocks, the main objective of this paper is to determine to what extent these competences should be transferred to the federal level. In this respect, we will consider whether a federal leap is necessary in several areas, namely (i) monetary and fiscal policy (rules), (ii) labor markets policy and social models, migratory flows and skill shortages, and cooperation policy and (iii) renewed industrial policy and exchange rates. Despite a highly uncertain context, we outline some perspectives for the future of the European Union.

No abstract