Consolidating the Budget Under Difficult Conditions – Ten Guidelines Viewed Against Europe's Beginning Consolidation Programmes

Apparently the consolidation programmes that individual EU countries have presented so far broadly tend to take "the easy road". The latter includes short-term cuts in public sector pay, which are easy to push through, but do not lead to a lasting improvement of public finances, as well as an increase of taxes on consumption, the largest component of aggregate demand. These measures are implemented without simultaneously initiating comprehensive structural reforms of government spending as well as tax systems. They largely disregard the problems which already existed before the economic crisis or even contributed to it.