Cyclically adjusted local government balances

The paper provides an analysis of cyclically-adjusted budget balances of local governments in Italy for the period 2002-07. We find that local government balances appear to be relatively sensitive to the business cycle. In particular, a shock of 1 per cent in GDP changes their resources by approximately 0.6 billion. Within the sample period, both central and local policies concerning local government budgets had a sizeable impact on local government balances in cyclically-adjusted terms.