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International audience; At odds with the large literature devoted to the fiscal discipline effects of fiscal rules, only few contributions investigate their impact on public spending. Using a large sample of 185 countries, estimations based on the entropy balancing method reveal the following causal effects: fiscal rules significantly reduce total public spending and public consumption, leave public investment mostly unaffected, and increase the public investment-to-public consumption ratio. Moreover, the type of fiscal rule and countries' level of economic development influence the way fiscal rules affect public spending. Lastly, fiscal rules' features seem to be a major driving force of the way governments change public spending-and, notably, total spending and public investment-in response to the adoption of fiscal rules. Consequently, the public investment decline during recent times should mostly be attributable to other things but fiscal rules (which sometimes even raise public investment); and increased attention should be given to the various fiscal rules' features, which may enforce or, on the contrary, weaken their fiscal discipline performances.

International audience

Despite a large literature linking fiscal policy and income inequality (IQ), the relationship between fiscal rules (FR) and IQ is severely underexplored. In a large panel of developing countries, propensity score matching estimations reveal that countries that adopted FR experience a significant decrease in their IQ with respect to countries that did not. Economically meaningful, this favorable effect is robust to a wide set of alternative measurement, methodology, and modeling specifications. Moreover, we unveil significant differences among FR: balanced budget and debt rules robustly decrease IQ, contrary to expenditure rules that increase it. Finally, the effect of FR on IQ is subject to heterogeneity related to structural factors. Given the current global IQ trends, our results showing that the FR are not neutral for IQ may provide insightful evidence for governments of countries aiming at adopting FR.

International audience; This paper shows that, contrary to their favourable effect in the EU non-FCC (Former Communist Countries), fiscal rules do not significantly affect fiscal performance in the group of EU FCC. This finding, which may echo differences between FCC and other EU inherited from the Cold War period, is robust when considering various estimation methods, dividing fiscal rules along various dimensions, and using several observed and computed measures of fiscal performance. However, when going beyond the simple presence of fiscal rules, we find that an improvement of the strength of fiscal rules significantly affects fiscal performance in EU FCC, with a magnitude higher than that in EU non-FCC. Our findings are particularly important from the perspective of the future Euro zone and European Union enlargements, which involve former communist countries, and go along with the adoption of various types of fiscal rules.