- Enseignant-e: Lukas Martin Haffert
Between a third and one half of GDP flow through public budgets every year in developed economies. How the public finances are organized, how public revenue is generated, and what it is spent for thus has an enormous influence on the development of the economy and of society more broadly. Furthermore, persistent fiscal imbalances or the acute need to insert public money into reeling banking systems can threaten the stability of entire countries, as recent debt crises have dramatically demonstrated.
How can we explain such imbalances? Why have some states much bigger governments than others? Who decides what public revenue is spent for? And how is it raised? This course will explore the main theoretical approaches to the study of fiscal policy, place them in the historical context in which they were formulated, and apply them to current policy debates. It relies primarily on class discussions of original research in the field of comparative political economy.