Financial Policy in the Netherlands 1977-2002: The Effects of Fiscal Contracts

The paper analyses the course of Dutch financial policy since the demise of Keynesian full employment. How did the public expenditure ratio, the tax burden, and the deficit develop in the last twenty-five years? Why did the government lose control over public spending in the period between 1977 and 1982, even though it proved possible to reduce spending continuously thereafter? Important explanatory variables in this context are economic growth and the ideological orientation of the government. In the 1990s, however, a literature on the common pool resource problem of public budgets developed... Mehr ...