Countries increasingly rely on independent fiscal councils to constrain policymakers’ discretion and
curb the bias towards excessive deficits and pro-cyclical policies. Since fiscal councils are often
recent and heterogeneous across countries, assessing their impact is challenging. Using the latest
(2016) vintage of the IMF Fiscal Council Dataset, we focus on two tasks expected to strengthen fiscal
performance: the preparation or assessment of forecasts, and the monitoring of compliance with fiscal
rules. Tentative econometric evidence suggests that the presence of a fiscal council is associated with
more accurate and less optimistic fiscal forecasts, as well as greater compliance with fiscal rules.
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