Comparative Fiscal Policy: a study between Brazil and Spain for the period 2000-2016
Spain; Brazil; fiscal policy; fiscal consolidation
During the first years of the 21st century both Brazil and Spain went through processes of strong economic growth. After 2008 financial bubble burst in the United States and spread to the rest of the world, the two countries suffered, at different times, a deep recessive process. Numerous theoretical approaches on how to deal with a situation of economic crisis are brought to the debate in the field of Economics to confront this situation. The importance of fiscal policy has been treated differently as economic theories have evolved. Fiscal consolidation processes have been recurrent in both countries as a way to combat the economic recession. The present work has two main objectives. Firstly, a bibliographical review is carried out in which two perspectives, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, are presented from the point of view of macroeconomics, in order to highlight the differences in relation to their visions in fiscal policy. Secondly, it is exposed a summary of the evolution of macroeconomic variables, with emphasis on the fiscal and monetary indicators of Spain and Brazil, for the period between 2000 and 2016.