Fiscal rules are among the cornerstones of macroeconomic policies in the European Union, both on the national and the supranational level. The importance of enacting and conducting the fiscal rules has become apparent after the expansion of public debts and budget deficits in the period of the global financial crisis. Besides the supranational rules, governments impose national fiscal rules in order to fulfill the convergence criteria for public debt and the budget deficit. Still, there is an open question on their influence on other economic parameters. This paper examines contextual variables that influenced the efficiency of implementing fiscal rules in 28 European Union countries. We observe the period of the last financial crisis and its aftermath when most of the countries introduced new or adjusted existing national fiscal rules, using two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The main goal of the paper is to study the impact of contextual variables on fiscal rules’ efficiency scores. In the first stage, we specify the DEA model to estimate the relative efficiency for each observed country in each year in the period from 2008 to 2016. After that, in the second stage, the efficiency scores are regressed on several contextual variables to observe the factors that explicate the variation in DEA-efficiency.

中文翻译：

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对影响欧盟财政规则效率的环境变量进行分析

在国家和超国家层面，财政法规都是欧盟宏观经济政策的基石之一。在全球金融危机期间公共债务和预算赤字扩大之后，制定和执行财政规则的重要性变得显而易见。除超国家规则外，政府还实施国家财政规则，以便满足公共债务和预算赤字的趋同标准。但是，它们对其他经济参数的影响尚待解决。本文研究了影响欧洲28个国家实施财政规则效率的背景变量。我们观察到上一次金融危机的时期及其后果，当时大多数国家/地区采用了新的或调整后的现有国家财政法规，使用两阶段数据包络分析（DEA）。本文的主要目的是研究上下文变量对财政规则效率得分的影响。在第一阶段，我们指定DEA模型来估计每个观察到的国家在2008年至2016年期间的相对效率。此后，在第二阶段，将效率得分对几个上下文变量进行回归以观察阐明DEA效率差异的因素。