The Politics of Tough Budgets: The Eurozone Periphery 2008-2011

摘要

The global financial crisis opened large budget deficit and public debt problems in the countries of the Eurozone periphery –Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain. All have been required to adopt budget retrenchment measures, particularly so for the first three oncethey entered EU-­‐IMF loan programmes. This paper analyses the dynamics of fiscal responses to the crisis across the four cases, using the content of budget decisions andthe profile of budgetary outcomes as the principal primary data. These countries provideinteresting variation on several dimensions: in the origins of the crisis (with different mixes of public and private sector debt), in initial responses to the crisis (prioritizingan expansionary or a contractionary stance), in the composition of budget adjustment(revenue-­‐raising or expenditure-­‐cutting), and in the evolution of their budgetary stanceover time. The paper uses the full resources of case study methods to examine the policy configurations that underpin commonality and variation, and to expose the elements involved in complex causal processes. This analytical strategy enables usto investigate the political economy conditions underpinning fiscal policy choices inhard times.