Events

On November 5, 2024, President Christoph Badelt, together with Johannes Holler and Philip Schuster, presented a current budget outlook for 2024 and 2025 at a press conference of the FISK office.

The Fiscal Advisory Council, together with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) and the KDZ - Center for Public Administration Research, organized a press conference to provide a comprehensive overview of the urgent need for reform in the Austrian federal state. The focus was on central topics such as future investments, structural reforms in the financial equalization system and the strengthening of municipal services of general interest.

In addition, the book “Financial Equalization 2024: A Handbook” was presented at the press conference, which provides an in-depth insight into the Austrian financial equalization system, the innovations for the period 2024 to 2028 and existing reform requirements.

The Fiscal Advisory Council organised a workshop with renowned external speakers on the topic of "Fiscal dimensions of climate change and climate protection". The aim of the first session of the event was to discuss climate-relevant fiscal policy measures and to quantify their costs and benefits. The aim of the second session was to shed light on various options for taking climate-related factors into account in macroeconomic models in order to derive conclusions for the planned integration of a climate module into the FISK long-term model.

The FISK-Workshop focused on the evaluation of fiscal sustainability of Austrian public finances. Presentations outlined the main results of the sustainability analysis of the MoF/WIFO long-term-projection exercise, the sustainability reports by the European Commission and the newly established FISK-Fiscal Sustainability Report. All analyses calculate a long-term sustainability gap, which is driven by the increasing cost of ageing. Contrary to the other reports, the FISK expects health expenditure to be the main contributor to the demographically driven increase of expenditure. The FISK projections further show that structural reforms supported by growth enhancing investments are needed to close the long-run fiscal sustainability gap. In contrast, short-term oriented expansionary fiscal measures (e. g. pension payment increases above the legal inflation-linked automatism) increase the long-term fiscal sustainability gap.

The Fiscal Advisory Council discussed the future evolution of the EU economic governance framework with external top-class lecturers. The workshop intended both to prepare the main findings of the EC’s economic governance review and suggested reform options of the European Fiscal Board and think tanks, and to create the background for any Fiscal Advisory Council’s contributions to the current debate.

Impact-oriented budget management, mandatory in Austria at the federal government level since 2013, supports evidence-based policy decision-making and effective impact monitoring. However, impact assessment reports have varied greatly in terms of their informative value and the verifiability of results. The Austrian Fiscal Advisory Council intends to revive the discussion on how the estimations of fiscal and economic effects of complex reform plans under the fiscal impact assessment exercise might become more comprehensive and transparent by applying well-established methods.

The aging of the Austrian population will significantly increase government expenditure in the coming decades, above all in areas such as health care, long-term care, education, unemployment and pensions. The European Commission Ageing Report, which is published every three years, describes how aging-related government expenditure will evolve until 2070. During the workshop, national experts discussed and analyzed the methods and assumptions prescribed by the European Commission and the models used in Austria for projecting pension developments.

This Fiscal Advisory Council workshop explored the usefulness of net government debt concepts when measuring a country’s creditworthiness as well as the various calculation methods used. Participants analyzed, in particular, international and national approaches to calculating net government assets and net debt as well as asset valuation and discussed policy implications. In addition, an exchange of current experience with the introduction of financial accounts at individual levels of government highlighted issues encountered in practice.

The small, high-level workshop will explore the long-run fiscal challenges in an ageing society by focusing on the influence of demography on potential growth and fiscal development issues. International high-level representatives from various institutions (i.e. universities, the ECB, the European Commission, national fiscal councils) are going to participate.