Politiche di bilancio e debito pubblico nella storia italiana: un modello non lineare
Are Italy’s primary-surplus policies compatible with the sustainability of government debt? We address the question by examining
historical budget data in post-unification Italy, over the 150 years from 1862 to 2012. Controlling for temporary output, temporary
spending and world war-time periods in assessing whether primary surpluses significantly reacted to changes in debt, we find the
following results: (i) the hypothesis of nonlinearity in the surplus-debt relationship significantly outperforms the hypothesis of