Ricerc@Sapienza

Steve’s 1950 paper “Considerazioni sulla politica di bilancio” (On budgetary policy) is still extraordinarily relevant 65 years after its publication in Studi Urbinati (Annals of the University of Urbino), for its several hints on the budget balance rules in relation to both the public debt burden on GDP and the EU fiscal compact rules. These rules consider the structural budget in relation to potential output, thus taking into account the changes due to reforms. But shifts in the potential output curve may depend also on technological changes, political factors and other exogenous factors, such as developments in international trade. Steve develops his fiscal policy suggestions considering all these factors, in relation to Italy’s post-war ‘reconstruction’ period, the return to democracy, the impact of technological developments in the most advanced Western countries, and developmens in foreign exchanges. Under the stimulus of Steve work, we discuss these issues on the basis of the results obtained with a panel dataset of 19 OECD countries from 1991 to 2015, analysing the long run relationship between real Gdp and government budget constraints as captured by cyclically adjusted total deficits and general government total receipts as percentages of Gdp. We control the results with additional variables which may be credited to impact on Gdp in the short run. We test these effects also for a subsample of European countries. We find that, for the whole sample of 19 OECD countries, an increase in the cyclical adjusted budget deficit or a tax burden cut equally improves long run Gdp by 0.152%.