Wren-Lewis, S., (2013), “The ‘Official’ Cost Of Austerity”, Social Europe Journal, 29 October.
Well, not quite, but probably as close as we will ever get. In a new paper, Jan in‘t Veld uses the European Commission’s QUEST model to estimate the impact of fiscal consolidation in the Eurozone (EZ) from 2011 to 2013. The numbers in the table below include spillover effects from other EZ country fiscal consolidations, so they are best interpreted as the impact of overall EZ fiscal consolidation over this period. There are at least two important things to note about the exercise. First, they do not attempt to analyse the impact of the particular mix between cuts in spending and increases in taxes applied in each country. Instead the ‘input’ is simply the change in the general government primary structural balance each year, which is assumed to be equally balanced between expenditure and revenue measures. (More on this below.) Second, to a first approximation this fiscal consolidation is assumed to lead to no change in short or long term real interest rates during the 2011-13 period.
For the full article, press here.
Relevant Posts
- Tamborini, R., (2013), “Austerity and Growth: Dispelling Confusion with Some Facts”, EconoMonitor, 24 October.
- Traynor, I., (2013), “Crisis over in the eurozone? Not in the real world”, The Guardian, 09 October.
- De Grauwe, P. and Ji, Y., (2013), “The Legacy of Austerity in the Eurozone”, Centre for European Policy Studies, 04 October.