Belgium is facing higher structural deficits and rising debt after the pandemic and energy crisis. Fiscal consolidation is needed to lower inflation, rebuild buffers, reduce debt, and preserve Belgium’s social contract. While designing an appropriate fiscal consolidation path involves trade-offs, an ideally front-loaded and significant adjustment to achieve a medium-term structural balance would reduce public debt towards the 60 percent debt threshold, significantly reducing vulnerabilities. Experiences in other countries and in the past in Belgium show that while ambitious, such an adjustment is achievable. Comparisons with peers show that rationalizing and increasing the efficiency of social benefits and the public wage bill would need to be at the core of the consolidation effort. All federal entities should share the burden of the adjustment, in a coordinated manner, with accountability at all levels of government, and within a credible and clear multi-year consolidation plan. Comprehensive spending reviews would help target budgetary saving. To mitigate the growth impact in the near term and boost potential growth, public investment should be preserved, and the adjustment should go together with structural reforms to increase labor force participation and productivity.

Swiss citizens continue to enjoy high living standards on a range of dimensions. Economic growth has slowed but the healthy labour market is still supporting incomes and consumption. However, risks to the outlook are building. Monetary policy has been very accommodative but low interest rates are adding to financial risks. Fiscal policy is sound and debt low. There is scope to make greater use of available fiscal space. Adapting to population ageing is becoming pressing. This trend, along with digital transformation, will bring new opportunities for the economy and society, but challenges as well. Policies have not kept up with rising life expectancy, particularly the statutory retirement age. Updating the pension system and lowering barriers to working longer would ensure that workers continue to receive adequate incomes during retirement. Ageing will also pressure health care spending and increase demand for long-term care. Policies to contain costs and reduce fragmentation in the system can help maintain access to quality care. Switzerland is well placed to seize the opportunities offered by new technologies. Addressing the barriers to adoption, improving the availability of information and helping workers adapt will enable firms, individuals and governments to reap the benefits of digitalisation. SPECIAL FEATURE: POLICIES FOR AN AGEING SOCIETY

Should fiscal consolidations be front-loaded or proceed at a more steady pace, and how does this affect growth? We make an attempt to address this question using a three-step methodology. First, we modify a standard regression of growth on consolidation size to allow speed to affect the multiplier. Second, using the narrative dataset of Devries and others (2011), we construct a new sample of multi-year consolidation episodes for 17 advanced economies over 1978-2009. Third, we develop a novel concept of speed to measure the pace of the consolidation episodes identified in the data. The main empirical finding is that fast episodes have higher multipliers than gradual consolidations. This provides some preliminary support for consolidating at a steady pace, market access and a credible adjustment plan permitting. However, as the sample size is small, identifying mechanisms and testing robustness is difficult, and so our findings should not be interpreted causally.

This Technical Note discusses the results of the stress testing of Belgium’s banking and insurance sectors. Belgium’s financial sector remains resilient in the face of the rising cyclical vulnerabilities, but there is a need for closely monitoring risks. Stress tests on banks and insurance companies confirm that they can absorb credit, sovereign, and market losses in the event of a severe deterioration in macro-financial conditions. All banks meet minimum capital requirements and none needs to draw down its capital conservation buffer over the stress horizon. The risk of interbank contagion through direct exposures is low. Insurance companies are also generally resilient and losses incurred in the stress scenarios by those that belong to banking groups do not threaten the soundness of those groups.

The past several years of recession and slow recovery have raised much interest on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity, even as high public debts in many countries would call for fiscal consolidation. To evaluate the delicate balance between stimulus and consolidation requires measuring the size of fiscal multipliers, which often depends on having quarterly data so that exogenous fiscal policy shocks can be identified. We estimate fiscal multipliers using a novel methodology for identifying fiscal shocks within a structural vector autoregressive approach using annual data while controling for debt feedback effects. The estimation focuses on regions with scarce quarterly data (mostly low-income countries), and uses results for advanced economies, emerging market countries, and other broad groupings for which alternative estimates are available to validate the methodology. Differently from advanced and emerging market economies, fiscal consolidation in low-income countries has only a small temporary negative effect on growth while raising medium-term output. Shifting the composition of public spending toward capital expenditure further supports long-run growth.

This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify the motivation and budgetary impact of the fiscal policy changes, we examine contemporaneous policy documents, including Budgets, Budget Speeches, central bank reports, Convergence and Stability Programs submitted by the authorities to the European Commission, and IMF and OECD reports. The resulting series can be used to estimate the macroeconomic effects of fiscal consolidation.

Belgium: Selected Issues