If governments followed the optimal fiscal policy path, surpluses in good times would counter necessary deficits during economic downturns, leading to worldwide balance. The world, however, has chosen to go in a different direction in recent decades, avoiding thrift in light of a decidedly more indebted future. When financial crises kicked off a global recession in 2008, the spotlight placed on countries’ fiscal conditions put pressure on policymakers around the globe to find a way to slow the growth of deficits and debt by imposing fiscal consolidations (or, more simply, austerity). How have these policies fared across the developed world? Were they even necessary to begin with? This book examines the many factors that have contributed to the success (or failure) of such policies, including timing, magnitude, accompanying policies, composition, and more, while explaining the economic rationale behind their choices.
A revealing look at austerity measures that succeed—and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging economic issues, three leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt, shows that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.
This book studies how municipalities (can) deal with fiscal stress. It applies an institutional perspective, arguing that municipalities can move beyond a fiscal focus and performance optimization, towards building institutional capacities to innovatively deal with fiscal crises. The book shows that many municipalities mainly opt for safe financial measures with quick results. It also shows, however, that some municipalities do invest in seeking new measures, and that they deal differently with the current crisis and create leeway to deal differently with future crises. They bend and stretch constraining rules, norms, and beliefs. More innovative responses are established when municipalities move beyond dominant doctrines (deviate), when they identify and translate potential innovations into concise decisions (decipher), and when they perform dynamic acts of implementation that fit the context of austerity (deliver). The book concludes with an emphasis on the 'austerity paradox': opting for financially driven austerity actions does not enable municipalities to deal with fiscal crises. Municipalities can bounce forward by opting for alternative solutions that pay attention to the non-financial aspects of dealing with financial crises, most specifically knowledge, routines, cultures and mentalities.
Conventional wisdom holds that voters punish governments that implement fiscal austerity. Yet, most empirical studies, which rely on ex-post yearly austerity measures, do not find supportive evidence. This paper revisits the issue using action-based, real-time, ex-ante measures of fiscal austerity as well as a new database of changes in vote shares of incumbent parties. The analysis emphasizes the importance of the ‘how’—whether austerity is done via tax hikes or expenditure cuts—and the ‘who’—whether it is carried out by left- vs. right-leaning governments. Our main finding is that tax-based austerity carries large electoral costs, while the effect of expenditure-based consolidations depends on the political-leaning of the government. An austerity package worth 1% of GDP, carried out mostly through tax hikes, reduces the vote share of the leader’s party by about 7%. In contrast, expenditure-based austerity is detrimental for left- but beneficial for right-leaning governments. We also find that the electoral cost of austerity—especially tax hikes—can be contained if it is implemented during good economic times.
In Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Mark Blyth, a renowned scholar of political economy, provides a powerful and trenchant account of the shift toward austerity policies by governments throughout the world since 2009. The issue is at the crux about how to emerge from the Great Recession, and will drive the debate for the foreseeable future.
We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.
This multidisciplinary book unpacks and outlines the contested roles of nationalism and democracy in the formation and transformation of welfare-state institutions and ideologies. At a time when neo-liberal, post-national and nationalist visions alike have challenged democratic welfare nationalism, the book offers a transnational historical perspective to the political dynamics of current changes. While particularly focusing on Nordic countries, often seen as the quintessential ‘models’ of the welfare state, the book collectively sheds light on the ‘history of the present’ of nation states bearing the character of a welfare state.
This paper analyzes optimal fiscal policy with ambiguity aversion and endogenous government spending. We show that, without ambiguity, optimal surplus-to-output ratios are acyclical and that there is no rationale for either reduction or further accumulation of public debt. In contrast, ambiguity about the cycle can generate optimally policies that resemble "austerity'' measures. Optimal policy prescribes higher taxes in adverse times and front-loaded fiscal consolidations that lead to a balanced primary budget in the long-run. This is the case when interest rates are sufficiently responsive to cyclical shocks, that is, when the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is sufficiently low.
Fiscal policy challenges following the Great Recession forced members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to implement a set of economic policies to manage public debt. Most actions centered on major spending cuts and increasing taxes in an attempt to manage political and social fallout. Governments put fiscal austerity measures in place when their debt is so large that the inability to honor required service payments or the risk of total default to obligations becomes a significant possibility. Accountability is an iconic concept in public management, offering symbolic responsibility and reassurance. It is part of an ethical principal of transparency situated in administrative accountability. The resilience of national economies worldwide ultimately requires a balance between near-term growth and longer-term fiscal consolidation. Still, the reality of social stressors raises questions for politically sustainability. As the OECD member nations emerged from the fiscal fall out in 2008, question about whether democratic countries can take pro-active leadership before a crisis forces their hand emerged. This book is a collection of country chapters detailing their austerity response to such an interconnected and punctuating event. Tonya E. Thornton, PhD, is a Principal with and Founder of Delta Point Solutions, LLC, an interdisciplinary, social, policy, and administrative sciences consulting firm with expertise in community resiliency, emergency management, and public safety. She is also a subject matter expert in critical infrastructure for the U.S. Department of Defense. Dr. Thornton's work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, and she is the editor of Managing Challenges for the Flint Water Crisis (2021). F. Stevens Redburn, PhD, is a lecturer, budget advisor, and expert authority on financial management, government performance, and public policy with over 25 years of experience as a senior government official in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. As a participant in deliberations of the National Budgeting Roundtable since 2014, he has helped lead research on reform of the federal government's budget process. Internationally, he has consulted on budget processes World Bank and for the International Monetary Fund.
