Institutions, Politics and Fiscal Policy

The large and persistent deficits observed in many countries and the reform efforts undertaken to strengthen fiscal discipline have been the focus of a research programme in political economy. This book draws together contributions from two competing approaches, seeking to explain why deficits emerge and persist, the partisan approach and the institutionalist approach. The individual chapters, originally written for a research conference of the Centre for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn, extend previous research and present new empirical evidence. The study also reports on three cases of institutional reform of the budget process in Belgium, Canada and Sweden.