The Road to Stable Public Finances
The Importance of Being Prudent--Sweden's Fiscal Approach
Monday, April 18, 2011 | 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
About This Event
Online registration for this event is closed. Walk-in registrations will be accepted.
If you cannot attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page.
What are the lessons to be learned from Sweden's handling of its latest financial and economic crises? Can Sweden's policies and institutional frameworks inspire US actions? Similar to the United States today, Sweden faced an excessive fiscal deficit and a ballooning debt in the nineties. At this AEI event, Sweden's minister of finance, Anders Borg, will explain Sweden's consolidation efforts, which were based on a mixture of expenditure cuts and tax increases.
Minister Borg will demonstrate that a robust fiscal policy framework, with an explicit expenditure ceiling and surplus target, as well as structural reforms, has helped maintain strong public finances and stimulate rapid recovery in the recent economic downturn.
If you cannot attend, we welcome you to watch the event live on this page.
What are the lessons to be learned from Sweden's handling of its latest financial and economic crises? Can Sweden's policies and institutional frameworks inspire US actions? Similar to the United States today, Sweden faced an excessive fiscal deficit and a ballooning debt in the nineties. At this AEI event, Sweden's minister of finance, Anders Borg, will explain Sweden's consolidation efforts, which were based on a mixture of expenditure cuts and tax increases.
Minister Borg will demonstrate that a robust fiscal policy framework, with an explicit expenditure ceiling and surplus target, as well as structural reforms, has helped maintain strong public finances and stimulate rapid recovery in the recent economic downturn.
Agenda
12:45 p.m.
Registration
1:00
Presentation:
ANDERS ERIK BORG, Minister of Finance, Sweden
Panelists:
JOHNNY MUNKHAMMAR, Member of Parliament, Sweden
CARMEN REINHART, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Registration
1:00
Presentation:
ANDERS ERIK BORG, Minister of Finance, Sweden
Panelists:
JOHNNY MUNKHAMMAR, Member of Parliament, Sweden
CARMEN REINHART, Peterson Institute for International Economics
VINCENT R. REINHART, AEI
Moderator:
KEVIN A. HASSETT, AEI
2:30
Adjournment
Event Contact Information
Rohan Poojara
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-5852
E-mail: rohan.poojara@aei.org
Media Contact Information
Veronique Rodman
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-4870
E-mail: VRodman@aei.org
Anders Borg has been the Swedish finance minister since 2006. The Financial Times ranked Minister Borg the fourth most successful minister of finance in the European Union in 2009 and 2010. Previously, he was chief economist of the Moderate Party, senior economist at various commercial banks, and adviser to the executive board of the Swedish Riksbank. Minister Borg was also a member of the board of the Swedish Labour Market Administration in 2005.
Johnny Munkhammar is a member of Parliament in Sweden for the Moderate Party. Mr. Munkhammar is the author of several books on economic policy and welfare reform, notably European Dawn: After the Social Model (Stockholm Network, 2005) and The Guide to Reform (Timbro, 2007). Previously, he was an entrepreneur; senior adviser for the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise; program director at Timbro, a think tank; and partner at a public-relations agency. Mr. Munkhammar is a frequent speaker on economic reform throughout Europe and the United States and is active in the public debate and as a commentator in the media.
Carmen M. Reinhart is the coauthor of This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton University Press, 2009, with Kenneth S. Rogoff). Ms. Reinhart was recently appointed as the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She has been a professor of economics and director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland since 1996. She was chief economist and vice president at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s and subsequently spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. Ms. Reinhart is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has written on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Vincent R. Reinhart is a resident scholar at AEI. He is a former director of the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Monetary Affairs, and has spent more than two decades working on domestic and international aspects of US monetary policy. He has held a number of senior positions in the Division of Monetary Affairs and the Division of International Finance and served for the last six years of his Federal Reserve career as secretary and economist of the Federal Open Market Committee. Mr. Reinhart worked on topics as varied as economic bubbles and the conduct of monetary policy, auctions of US Treasury securities, alternative strategies for monetary policy, and the efficient communication of monetary policy decisions. At AEI, he has continued his work on all the above in addition to research on key economic variables before and after adverse global and country-specific shocks, policy mistakes leading to the 2007–2009 financial meltdown, and the implementation and impact of quantitative easing.
Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a senior fellow at AEI. Before joining AEI, he was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University, as well as a policy consultant to the Treasury Department during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He served as an economic adviser to the George W. Bush 2004 presidential campaign, chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries, and senior economic adviser to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Hassett writes a weekly column for Bloomberg.
