TY - CHAP A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A2 - Ayuso-i-Casals, Joaquim A2 - Deroose, Servaas A2 - Flores, Elena A2 - Moulin, Laurent T1 - Who Provides Signals to Voters about Government Competence on Fiscal Matters? The Importance of Independent Watchdogs T2 - Policy Instruments for Sound Fiscal Policies N2 - The Maastricht Treaty set a series of convergence criteria that Member States have to meet to join the euro area. The Treaty is not specific, however, about how to prevent free-riding fiscal behaviour once Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is in place. The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) represents an institutional response.1 Its design includes preventive and corrective mechanisms. The emphasis for the preventive arm rests on the monitoring of Member State behaviour. Euro-area Member States produce Stability Programme updates yearly in the autumn. The European Commission, for its part, assesses the programmes and makes recommendations to the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers (henceforth ‘ECOFIN’) on whether the programmes meet European fiscal objectives, which in particular includes the achievement of budget positions ‘close to balance or in surplus’. In order to move to the formal corrective arm of the Pact, a Member State would have to be found to have an ‘excessive deficit’. Y1 - 2007 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2616 SN - 978-0-230-27179-1 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230271791_11 PB - Palgrave Macmillan CY - London ER -