Government Expenditures and Revenues in Italy in a Long-run Perspective

The aim of this study is to investigate the sustainability of Italian public accounts using in a long-run perspective, using empirical tests on sustainability and solvency of the country’s fiscal policies. The results of unit root and stationarity tests show that government expenditures and revenues series are first-differences stationary. The empirical analysis considered both the entire period and two sub-periods (1862–1913, 1947–2013). Furthermore, we conduct tests on cointegration, which evidence that a clear long-run relationship between public expenditure and revenues emerges only for the years 1862–1913. In essence, the paper’s results reveal that Italy have sustainability problems in the republican age.