Euro area time‐varying fiscal sustainability

Abstract

We assess the time‐varying features of fiscal sustainability in the euro area via revisiting the empirical relationship between the primary budget surplus and the debt‐to‐GDP ratio. Focusing on a sample of 11 Euro‐area countries between 1999Q1 and 2013Q4 and by means of time series analyses, we find that (a) fiscal policy seems to have been sustainable in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands and a Ricardian (monetary dominant) regime might have been present; (b) debt exhibited a negative response following an innovation in the budget surplus in half of the sample; (c) the time‐varying coefficient model shows that the 2008–2009 global economic and financial crisis exerted a sizeable negative impact on fiscal sustainability; and (d) expenditure‐based fiscal rules are strong determinants of fiscal sustainability. All in all, we found some evidence against the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level.

Additive Manufacturing of Poly(propylene) by Means of Melt Extrusion

“…At the same time, the costs of products should at least remain stable so that higher revenues can be reached and no risk of losing customers does arise. [1,2] Additive manufacturing (AM) comprises processes which enable the production of parts directly out of a digital part model and direct digital manufacturing of 3D design data without the need for additional tools or molds. [3] Due to the nearly unlimited freedom of design and high flexibility in the production of complex and integrated functional designs, AM is one of the areas with the greatest potentials to satisfy the previously mentioned recent demands of production.…”

Does Government Spending Efficiency Improve Fiscal Sustainability?

“…We present the results of Models 1 and 2 in Tables 1 and 2, respectively. 6 Both tables present three different estimation results: including one for the whole dataset; another one for the country-year pairwise whose correlation between the efficiency scores and the sustainability magnitudes is above 0.25 (to focus on the cases where a closer nexus can expected). The results obtained lead us to conclude that higher public spending efficiency positively contributes to improve fiscal sustainability.…”

To consolidate or not to consolidate? A multi-step analysis to assess needed fiscal sustainability

“…In what concerns fiscal sustainability, the existing literature has mainly assessed public finances sustainability, through a long-run relationship between public revenues and expenditures, for advanced economies and concluding for the fiscal policy sustainability (Afonso and Rault, 2010;Afonso and Jalles, 2014b;Afonso and Rault, 2014;Afonso and Jalles, 2017;Magazzino et al, 2019). However, when examining different country regions within advanced economies, some different results emerge, namely the unsustainable path that peripheral Euro-area economies has taken as the Greek and Spanish cases, for instance (Paniagua et al, 2017;Brady and Magazzino, 2018).…”