IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eab/wpaper/24835.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Long-term fiscal sustainability in advanced economies

Author

Listed:
  • Alan J. Auerbach

Abstract

This paper provides an evaluation of the long-term fiscal sustainability of advanced economies, based on current estimates of these economies’ current-policy fiscal trajectories. As will be quite evident, for many countries short-term fiscal measures, such as the debt-GDP ratio and the current budget deficit as a share of GDP, bear little relationship to the sustainability of policy. Some countries appear to be on relatively sustainable paths despite challenging short-run statistics, while for others benign short-term measures mask very large long-term problems. Of course, the future is uncertain while the present is known, so one may be tempted to discount negative long-term projections. But, based as they are on a demographic transition that is surely underway, one can discount particular estimates but not their general direction.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan J. Auerbach, 2015. "Long-term fiscal sustainability in advanced economies," EABER Working Papers 24835, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:eab:wpaper:24835
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.eaber.org/node/24835
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alan J. Auerbach, 2008. "Federal Budget Rules: The US Experience," NBER Working Papers 14288, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Xavier Debrun & Tidiane Kinda, 2017. "Strengthening Post‐Crisis Fiscal Credibility: Fiscal Councils on the Rise – A New Dataset," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 38, pages 667-700, December.
    3. Alberto Alesina & Silvia Ardagna, 2013. "The Design of Fiscal Adjustments," Tax Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 27(1), pages 19-68.
    4. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 45471, Congressional Budget Office.
    5. Congressional Budget Office, 2014. "The 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook," Reports 45471, Congressional Budget Office.
    6. Alan J Auerbach, 2011. "Long-term fiscal sustainability in major economies," BIS Working Papers 361, Bank for International Settlements.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. María del Carmen Ramos-Herrera & Simón Sosvilla-Rivero, 2020. "Fiscal Sustainability in Aging Societies: Evidence from Euro Area Countries," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(24), pages 1-20, December.
    2. Lars P. Feld & Ekkehard A. Köhler & Julia Wolfinger, 2020. "Modeling fiscal sustainability in dynamic macro-panels with heterogeneous effects: evidence from German federal states," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 27(1), pages 215-239, February.
    3. Shiro Armstrong & Tatsuyoshi Okimoto, 2016. "Fiscal Sustainability in Japan," Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 3(2), pages 235-243, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hanming Fang & Qing Gong, 2017. "Detecting Potential Overbilling in Medicare Reimbursement via Hours Worked," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(2), pages 562-591, February.
    2. Duncan Ermini Leaf & Bryan Tysinger & Dana P. Goldman & Darius N. Lakdawalla, 2021. "Predicting quantity and quality of life with the Future Elderly Model," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(S1), pages 52-79, November.
    3. Imtiaz Bhatti & Marvin Phaup, 2015. "Budgeting for Fiscal Uncertainty and Bias: A Federal Process Proposal," Public Budgeting & Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 89-105, June.
    4. Kazumasa Oguro, 2014. "Challenges confronting Abenomics and Japanese public finance ?Fiscal consolidation must start by squarely facing reality?," Public Policy Review, Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Finance Japan, vol. 10(2), pages 301-318, August.
    5. Robert Garnett & Kimmarie Mcgoldrick, 2014. "A 'Big Think' Approach to Government Debt: Promoting Significant Learning in Introductory Macroeconomics," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(4), pages 628-647, October.
    6. Martin Feldstein, 2015. "Raising Revenue by Limiting Tax Expenditures," Tax Policy and the Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 1-11.
    7. Thomas Url & Rob J Hyndman & Alexander Dokumentov, 2016. "Long-term forecasts of age-specific participation rates with functional data models," Monash Econometrics and Business Statistics Working Papers 3/16, Monash University, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
    8. Jason L. Saving & Alan D. Viard, 2015. "Are income taxes destined to rise? the fiscal imbalance and future tax policy," Working Papers 1502, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
    9. Michael Clemens, 2021. "The Fiscal Effect of Immigration: Reducing Bias in Influential Estimates," CESifo Working Paper Series 9464, CESifo.
    10. Òscar Jordà & Chitra Marti & Fernanda Nechio & Eric Tallman, 2019. "Inflation: Stress-Testing the Phillips Curve," FRBSF Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    11. Holston, Kathryn & Laubach, Thomas & Williams, John C., 2017. "Measuring the natural rate of interest: International trends and determinants," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 108(S1), pages 59-75.
    12. Thomas Laubach & John C. Williams, 2015. "Measuring the natural rate of interest redux," Working Paper Series 2015-16, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    13. Thomas Url & Rob J. Hyndman & Alexander Dokumentov, 2016. "Long-term Forecasts of Age-specific Labour Market Participation Rates with Functional Data Models," WIFO Working Papers 510, WIFO.
    14. Canyon Bosler & Mary C. Daly & John G. Fernald & Bart Hobijn, 2017. "The Outlook for US Labor-Quality Growth," NBER Chapters, in: Education, Skills, and Technical Change: Implications for Future US GDP Growth, pages 61-110, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. William N. Butos, 2015. "The Bernanke Fed and "Credit Easing" Policies, 2008-2014," Journal of Private Enterprise, The Association of Private Enterprise Education, vol. 30(Winter 20), pages 1-15.
    16. Hans Pitlik & Michael Klien & Stefan Schiman, 2017. "Stabilitätskonforme Berücksichtigung nachhaltiger öffentlicher Investitionen," WIFO Studies, WIFO, number 60595.
    17. Hüseyin ŞEN & Ayşe KAYA, 2017. "Mali Konsolidasyon Büyüme ve İstihdam için Bir Çıpa mı, Mali Tuzak mı? Teorik ve Ampirik Literatür Temelli Bir Analiz," Sosyoekonomi Journal, Sosyoekonomi Society, issue 25(34).
    18. António AFONSO & Priscilla TOFFANO, 2013. "Fiscal regimes in the EU," Working Papers of Department of Economics, Leuven ces13.06, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Economics, Leuven.
    19. Calmfors, Lars, 2015. "The Roles of Fiscal Rules, Fiscal Councils and Fiscal Union in EU Integration," Working Paper Series 1076, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    20. Heap, Shaun P. Hargreaves & Koop, Christel & Matakos, Konstantinos & Unan, Asli & Weber, Nina Sophie, 2021. "We Cannot Disagree Forever! Reality Polarization and Citizens’ Post-Pandemic Fiscal Adjustment Preferences," SocArXiv 69tup, Center for Open Science.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fiscal Sustainability; public debt; Fiscal Gap;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H62 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Deficit; Surplus
    • H63 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Debt; Debt Management; Sovereign Debt
    • H68 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt - - - Forecasts of Budgets, Deficits, and Debt

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eab:wpaper:24835. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Shiro Armstrong (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eaberau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.