Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 25th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview V. Public Finance and Management Author(s) Laszlo Vertesy Budapest University of Technology and Economics Budapest Hungary Title Constitutional Basis of Public Finances File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Laszlo Vertesy Abstract After the Mortgage-debt Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis some remarkable and significant changes can be identified in public finances. In connection with this, new elements were incorporated to constitutions. Constitutional economics – in economics and constitutionalism – can be described as explaining the choice of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the choices and activities of economic and political agents. The main hypothesis can be formulated as, is there any correlation between the constitutional provisions (and other relevant law sources) and the performance of the economy: GDP growth, sound and sustainable financial policy: government debt and budget deficit, furthermore monetary policy; on the other hand, after the amendments any changes can be identified or not. The research is based on legal and economic methodology with quantitative approach. It will analyse and compare some relevant NISPAcee countries’ constitutional examples, how the states settle the basis in their constitutions. On constitutional level, therefore the following elements are relevant: definition of the type of domestic economy, fundamental principles of taxation, redistribution, the formulation and implementation of the state budgeting, state / federal audit or budgeting authority, discharge, central bank, transparency and sustainability, and other provisions on fiscal policy (national debt, deficit, national assets), stability. The paper contains some statistics on the economies of the NISPAcee countries to evaluate the certain results upon figures, because it is even important to match the provisions with the economic performance. The paper tries to follows the categories: new EU member countries, non-EU member countries in Eastern Europe, countries in the West Balkans, countries of Central Asia and countries in the Caucasus.
