L’efficacité des règles budgétaires dans les provinces canadiennes

This article contributes to the current policy debate about fiscal rules, an issue that recently rose to prominence given the fiscal deficits inherited from the Great Recession. The diversity of rules in place in Canada provides a quasi natural experiment to study the impact of such rules. We provide a classification of the balanced budget rules adopted by Canada?s 10 provinces, which we then exploit to assess these rules? performance through an econometric analysis performed on the post 1980 period. Taking into account the endogeneity of fiscal rule adoption, our results confirm that strict rules help in reducing the level of net debt.