In the wake of the greatest financial and economic crisis, current public budgets – especially of the federal government – have been incurring deficits of unprecedented dimensions. High deficits as well as the future burdens from demographic developments show that budget consolidation is not merely a matter of quantitatively short- and medium-term balancing of government spending and borrowing. Future-oriented, sustainable policies must instead be designed as structural reform policies that, in addition to the question of additional revenue and lower expenditures, also look at the quality of financial policy and take into consideration the question of inter-generational justice. The benefits and burdens of present policies for coming generations are also a key issue of environmental and climate protection policies, and these benefits and burdens as well as their distribution also have monetary and fiscal dimensions. An integrated consideration of both policy areas can help to recognise win-win situations and trade-offs as well as to identify early on possible lose-lose constellations. In the project the dimensions of environmentally sustainable fiscal policies and the framework conditions of fiscally sustainable budget policies are outlined in order to determine possible strategies for the integration of ecological and fiscal sustainability:
In a second step, selected measures will be analysed quantitatively. In the foreground are the effects on the public budgets, economic growth and employment as well as greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental effects. For the macro and environmental-economic modelling of the measures, an expanded input-output-model developed by IEF-STE is available. Then, with the FiFo sustainability model, the corresponding effects on medium and long-term government spending and borrowing of the federal government and the state as a whole will be determined. The goal is as close a linking as possible of the macroeconomic and the sustainability models.
RSS