Umsetzung der Schuldenbremse in Eigenverantwortung der Länder: Ist die „schwarze Null“ gewollt?

The budgets of the German federal states must be structurally balanced to comply with the provisions of Article 109 of the Basic Law on the debt brake. This rule applies to the federal states from 2020. In line with German federalism, the exact formulation was left to the federal states. Debt rules that have been implemented in the respective state constitutions, while similar, are often different in terms of content. This study compares the constitutional state provisions of the debt brake in terms of their substantive design using an Analytical Hierarchy Processing approach. Our findings show that within the constitutional provisions on the debt brake, only a few federal states formulate requirements that can be qualified as being restrictive, meaning that the legal leeway was widely used. Significant differences can be found, for example, in the constitutional requirements regarding repayment rules, the definition and determination of exemptions, and the area of application of the debt brake under budgetary law. In many German federal states, the debt brake is not a very tight restriction, and even an intertemporal “black zero” seems a long way off.