Fiscal rules and other rule-based mechanisms in practice: introduction to case studies of four Member States
One of the most striking economic governance trends of recent years has been the increased resort to fiscal rules. In the EU as a whole, the number of fiscal rules recorded by the European Commission in its fiscal rules database has risen nearly tenfold since the early 1990s. Such rules have varied considerably across countries. Nearly all EU Member States have also now established Fiscal Councils as independent agencies to monitor the conduct of fiscal policy.
The national case studies in this document provide a detailed examination of fiscal and other rules in four EU Member States: Italy, Poland, Slovakia and the UK.
The study by Grzegorz Poniatowski i Krzysztof Głowacki analyzes the fiscal rules that Poland has used to keep its fiscal policy disciplined and coordinated within the EU. This Report is divided into six sections. The first two sections set the stage for the analysis by listing the national fiscal rules in Poland, recounting their evolution and presenting their institutional setup. The next two sections provide an account of the compliance and commitment to the national and EU fiscal rules from the side of the Polish policy makers. The fifth section is an assessment of the effectiveness of the fiscal rules, and the sixth section concludes the paper. The report has three Annexes: Annex I contains graphs, Annex II is an account of the field work done for the purposes of the study, and Annex III enumerates the documents and other sources that were consulted.
The publication within the EU funded project FIRSTRUN – Fiscal Rules and Strategies under Externalities and Uncertainties.
