The Economic and Social Review at 50: A Review Article on Fiscal Policy Papers

This article provides a broad overview of published research in The Economic and Social Review (ESR) in the broad area of fiscal policy. It examines the patterns of publications and citations over time, those sub-areas which have seen the highest rate of publication and the nature of the data and techniques employed. The broad pattern which has emerged is that micro policy articles have increased in importance over the years with the availability of better quality data. Macro policy analysis remains important and has often concentrated upon episodes of fiscal crisis. In terms of citations, those papers which have been most heavily cited are overview papers, sometimes delivered by international scholars as invited presentations. There also seems to be a slight bias towards more recent publications with much work from the 1970s and 1980s largely ignored in terms of citations.