Law and macroeconomics: a legal-institutional analysis of fiscal policy

Abstract

The project to be developed in the period of the visit in the United States of America will be to study the reform of the legal regime of fiscal policy in the country. This research is a relevant part of the PhD research that aims at investigating how law shapes, uses and at the same time controls fiscal policy through the study of the reforms of the legal regimes of Brazil, India and the United States. Fiscal policy is understood in this project in a broad sense, comprehending: (i) the management of public revenues and public expenditures, (ii) the intensity and the dynamics of public indebtedness. The three countries are democratic federative republics that recently reformed legal statutes and institutions that constitute the formal aspects of the fiscal policy. The legal-institutional analysis aims to answer three questions: (i) which were the justifications publicly presented to promote the reforms (to verify if there is a global pressure for homogeneization of the legal regime of fiscal policy and if there are national differences), (ii) which domains of rules were domestically reformed, (iii) which institutional practices were established after the reform. (AU)