| Zusammenfassung: | Demographic trends, the need for reinforcing expenditure in forward-looking domains, one-off incidents like the tax reform 2015-16, the current wave of refugee immigration, financial support for banks in distress (even if clearly less than in previous years) and – last, but not least – the necessity to unwind the jump in public debt in the wake of the recession 2008-09, pose severe challenges for fiscal policy. The general government deficit (in the Maastricht definition) is expected to abate to 1.2 percent of GDP in 2017, while the structural deficit may edge up to 0.9 percent of GDP. The government debt ratio has turned around in 2016, declining from 83.2 percent of GDP to a projected 76.6 percent by 2020. Subsidies for ailing banks pushed up the debt ratio by 11.3 percent of GDP at the end of 2016.
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