During the ‘Golden Age’ that lasted until the mid-1970s, Europe witnessed a "public finance" phase, when the three sides of Musgrave’s triangle - allocative efficiency, redistribution and cyclical stabilisation - seemed to reinforce one another. EMU's fiscal rules - embodied in the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact - can be regarded as the attempt by European governments to overcome the subsequent "public choice" phase à la Buchanan which was characterised by increasing budget deficits and trade offs between allocative efficiency and redistribution. The original Stability Pact delivered only partly. A rigorous enforcement of the reformed Pact will depend on two conditions: the renewed ownership of the rules by key players and the relative weight of the perceived negative externalities of fiscal misbehaviour versus the political costs of attempting to limit the partner countries’ room for manoeuvre.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
5830.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E6 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents H6 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt
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