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This paper uses a new data set on budgetary institutions in Europe to examine the impact of fiscal rules and budget procedures in EU countries on public finances. It briefly describes the main pattern of budgetary institutions and their determinants across the EU 15 member states. Empirical evidence for the time period 1985–2004 suggests that the centralisation of budgeting procedures restrains public debt. In countries with one-party governments or coalition governments where parties are closely aligned and where political competition among them is low, this is achieved by the delegation of decision-making power to the minister of finance. Fiscal contracts that require countries to set multi-year targets and that reinforce those targets increase fiscal discipline in countries with ideologically dispersed coalitions and where parties regularly compete against each other.
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’.