17 November 2023

Bruegel's Zettlemeyer: Are the emerging EU fiscal rules green enough?

The European Commission’s April proposal for reforming the EU’s fiscal rules seems to be inching towards a political agreement in the Council. Spain proposed a ‘landing zone’ for the negotiations earlier this month, reflecting similar recommendations we made in September on how to improve the proposal. This includes giving more substance to the ‘no backloading’ condition that is supposed to prevent countries from postponing adjustment as well as a ‘debt safeguard’ which requires a fall in the debt ratio to the length of the four-to-seven-year adjustment period rather than mechanically to the first four years. The creation of a dedicated working group that reviews the debt sustainability analysis (DSA) used by the European Commission is also proposed, as well as to make the DSA fully transparent. This is an encouraging development.

The proposal also gives something to all sides. Italy would get flexibility to exempt 2025-26 spending related to the recovery and resilience fund from the tougher ‘no-backloading condition’. Poland would get explicit recognition of defence spending as a ‘relevant factor’ when triggering an excessive deficit procedure (EDP). Germany and other fiscally conservative members would get two additional safeguards: a new minimum debt reduction requirement after the adjustment period, and a requirement for countries to reduce their deficits by a yet-to-be specified ‘safety margin’ below the 3% of GDP benchmark.

There are however three remaining concerns. 

The first is that the additional safeguards might undermine the main purpose of the reform, which is to tailor fiscal adjustment to the debt risks of each member. Requiring significantly more adjustment than what can be justified by the DSA will undermine country ‘ownership’ of the adjustment. This worry could be addressed by calibrating the proposed safeguards so that they are not normally binding. Safeguards should be like guardrails that keep a car on the road if it swerves, not planks that narrow the road.

A second concern is that the negotiations seem to converge toward considering the commitments of the Recovery and Resilience Plans sufficient to fulfil the conditions of the extension in the first round of medium-term fiscal-structural plans. But the logic of offering an extension of the adjustment period from four-to-seven-year is to offer incentives for additional investment and reform efforts. Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRPs) reforms have already been agreed and financed through the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility. Furthermore, reforms and investment under the RRPs must be completed by August 2026, just two years into the initial seven year adjustment period. The three-year extension should therefore be contingent on convincing reforms and/or investment plans beyond the current RRPs. 

The final concern is that the proposed rules are not green enough. This relates to the design of the debt and no-backloading safeguards, which could prevent debt-financed investment spending even when the latter is fully consistent with debt sustainability. Consider, for example, a 1% of GDP per year increase in investment, under an EU-endorsed programme that lasts for seven years, accompanied by a steady fiscal adjustment (say by 0.5% of GDP per year) involving reductions in current spending and/or revenue increases. After seven years, the investment programme ends, the fiscal position is in surplus and debt would fall rapidly. Nonetheless, because debt has increased in the meantime to finance the investment, this plan would be rejected under the new rules. This makes no sense....

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