CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Máté, Ákos |
|---|---|
| Title | Debt and Deficit in the Age of Fiscal Councils: The Role of Institutions in Belgium and Slovakia, 1990-2018 |
| Summary | The stubbornness of high public debt and volatility in deficits motivated many policy solutions to fight the root causes of these issues. Recently a new breed of fiscal institutions were introduced to complement fiscal rules, called independent fiscal councils. The dissertation explores when and how these new institutions can work to fulfill their mandate in the European Union. I argue that the effectiveness of fiscal councils are highly context dependent and cannot be separated from their respective domestic and international institutional environment. In the dissertation I show that in order to have an impact on policy direction, fiscal councils need to be perceived as supporting institutions by the government in order to have their recommendations taken into account. When the government's preferred policy trajectory diverges from the recommended policy actions by the councils they are viewed as adversary institutions and due to a lack of enforcement tools on the part of the fiscal watchdogs their policy advice can be ignored by the government. The effectiveness is also conditional on the presence of external pressure such as the market pressure on the governments and the supranational fiscal framework of the European Union. I find that the reformed European framework does present a considerable amount of peer pressure and the European Commission can serve as an external support for the domestic fiscal councils. I also introduce a novel approach to the field by analyzing the policy network structure in which these new fiscal councils are embedded. I find that their position in the network facilitate their role by having access to the key governmental agencies and ministries. Combining a case based approach with network analysis I investigate institutional reforms and fiscal policy developments through the cases of Belgium and Slovakia from 1990 to 2018. The two countries provide a diverse set of cases with different levels and complexity of fiscal institutions as the Belgian High Council of Finance is the oldest fiscal council in Europe as opposed to Slovakia which performed an impressive institutional leapfrogging starting in the early 2000's. This methodological approach allows to shed light on how key institutional and political changes impacted fiscal policy. By including Slovakia in the dissertation, the research contributes to the literature by adding a detailed analysis of how institution building affected fiscal policy in a post-transition Central Eastern European member state. Both the case studies and the network analysis relies on original data collected via interviews and institutional surveys. |
| Supervisor | Csaba, László |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/mate_akos.pdf |
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