ABSTRACT
In this chapter, possible explanations for the fiscal consolidation undertaken by European governments are considered from three perspectives. First, the consolidation measures are explained from a financial-economic perspective. Second, one turns the attention to possible explanations of the government's fiscal consolidation by means of political factors. Third, one pays attention to supra-national explanatory factors, that is, circumstances that were beyond the influence of domestic governments. Therefore it begins by presenting some macro-economic indicators for the selected countries, in order to characterise the depth of the crisis. Then it carries out a statistical analysis of the single and well-defined quantitative variable volume of consolidation. After a brief overview of the economic and fiscal crisis in the selected countries, in terms of the Eurostat data about GDP growth and budget surplus/deficit, an overview was presented of the volume of fiscal consolidation plans in the various European countries as presented by the OECD in its survey.
