The focus of this volume is on the European context of public budget policy and a variety of different approaches are used - theoretical modelling, econometrics and applied general equilibrium modelling. Empirical evidence and case studies of European countries are contained in all the papers. The papers cover the four general themes of public budget policy: * economic stabilization, in view of the Economic and Monetary Union in the European Community * reinforcing structural change, involved in market liberalization and harmonization of economic structures * its distributional effects and implications for social equity * endogenous economic growth.

Alberto Heimler and Daniele Meulders In the last decade the modelling of the interrelationship between public finance and the rest of the economy has seen substantial advances, reflected in many of the papers delivered to the Applied Econometrics Association Conference held at Confindustria, Rome, on 30 November and 1 December 1989. In particular, the development of the literature on applied general-equilibrium modelling has found most of its applications in the field of taxation, enlarging and completing the estimation of the welfare loss due to distortionary taxes. In this context an important extension has been the introduction of overlapping-generation models. Furthermore, it has become clear that most individual decisions, especially the decision whether or not to work, are dependent upon the tax system, in the sense that the higher the marginal income tax the larger the wedge between labour cost and take-home pay, the last one being the decision variable in the demand for leisure. Finally, in the European context, the completion of the internal market has brought about the necessity to harmonize fiscal systems in the EEC member countries. A number of papers study, therefore, the effects of fiscal reform on efficiency, welfare and growth.

Budgetary policy plays an increasingly central role in modern economies. This volume explores different approaches to modelling this crucial area.

Traditionally, economics training in public finances has focused more on tax than public expenditure issues, and within expenditure, more on policy considerations than the more mundane matters of public expenditure management. For many years, the IMF's Public Expenditure Management Division has answered specific questions raised by fiscal economists on such missions. Based on this experience, these guidelines arose from the need to provide a general overview of the principles and practices observed in three key aspects of public expenditure management: budget preparation, budget execution, and cash planning. For each aspect of public expenditure management, the guidelines identify separately the differing practices in four groups of countries - the francophone systems, the Commonwealth systems, Latin America, and those in the transition economies. Edited by Barry H. Potter and Jack Diamond, this publication is intended for a general fiscal, or a general budget, advisor interested in the macroeconomic dimension of public expenditure management.

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policies--depicted as stochastic changes in government spending and distortionary tax rates--when the government is constrained from using lump sum taxes for achieving intertemporal budget balance. The ratio of debt to gnp, therefore, has consequences for the future choices of government spending and distortionary taxation and hence affects real economic activity. Further modeling fiscal policy in this way generates results that differ substantially from those in standard stochastic models where lump sum taxes are used for budget balance. The modeling of fiscal policy presented here is also consistent with empirical evidence on U.S. fiscal policy.

This project explores the stock-flow consistent (SFC) approach to modeling with the goal of examining the effectiveness of different fiscal policy tools, specifically tax policies and government expenditure. By exploring the historical and theoretical elements of stock-flow consistent models, we aim to gather insight on past successful models proven to predict crises. This paper begins with a history and continues into a simple SFC model thought experiment, which emphasizes the flexibility of the models as well as a precursor to the shock approach we employ at the end of the paper. We create Model ECONOMY with several strong assumptions, such as modeling a closed economy with an absence of the financial sector. By thoroughly comparing the results from the equations that comprise Model ECONOMY to that of historical data, we aim to provide legitimacy to the model. Once established, we will use the results from the baseline of Model ECONOMY and introduce shocks to the system. These shocks are forms of fiscal policy, from a decrease in taxes to an increase in government expenditures. We compare the results of the shocks to that of historical data from the same time period (2008-2015) in order to see what the effect would have been for each policy proposal. The goal of the paper is to use the SFC model to find an effective fiscal policy proposal.