Our October 2012 box generated many comments, criticisms, and suggestions. In this paper, we restate our methodology, revisit our results, examine their robustness, and consider a number of extensions. Section II presents our estimation approach and reports our baseline results. Our forecast data come from the spring 2010 IMF World Economic Outlook (IMF, 2010c), which includes forecasts of growth and fiscal consolidation—measured by the change in the structural fiscal balance—for 26 European economies. We find that a 1 percentage point of GDP rise in the fiscal consolidation forecast for 2010-11 was associated with a real GDP loss during.
