Abstract:

Budgetary consolidation is, today, at the forefront of the economic policy agenda of many EU member states, as their public finances severely deteriorated on the background of the economic and financial crisis. The main challenge proves to be that of conceiving and implementing a growth-friendly strategy, also taking into account national features. From this point of view, our work analyses the strategies and budgetary consolidation efforts recently undertaken by some EU Member States, with the aim to highlight the strategic particularities, their determinants and registered or expected effects, in order to allow for the extraction of some useful lessons. Effectively, we will identify in our work a set of measures to strengthen public revenues and reduce expenditures and will reveal the preference for a certain mix of those alternatives and its explanatory factors. We will also identify the main directions in which budgetary consolidation strategies should be reconsidered in the future, in order to potentiate their effects.