Fiscal sustainability in EMU countries: A continued fiscal commitment?

The aim of this paper is to study the sustainability of public finances in the Eurozone particularly after the 2007 financial crisis. This paper goes beyond the standard analysis of the univariate properties of the fiscal variables through the estimation of a time-varying fiscal reaction function on a 11-country panel for a period spanning from 1970 to 2014. Even if panel unit root or stationary tests may provide a rough first insight on the sustainability of the public finances, they fail to highlight the adjustment mechanisms to debt overhang in recent years. The main advantage of our empirical approach is that it clearly captures the government's dynamic response to debt accumulation, which signals its commitment to readjust public debt towards a sustainable path. Time-varying estimates of the fiscal reaction function shed new light on this respect and reveal certain heterogeneity among EMU countries on the way they manage their public finances. This paper helps ascertain whether the public resources destined to bail out troubled countries triggered effective fiscal responses.