Probabilistic Sustainability of Public Debt: A Vector Autoregression Approach for Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey

This paper examines the sustainability of fiscal policy under uncertainty in three emerging market countries—Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. For each country, we estimate a vector autoregression that includes fiscal and macroeconomic variables. Retrospectively, a historical decomposition shows by how much debt accumulation reflects unsustainable policy, adverse shocks, or both. Prospectively, Monte Carlo techniques reveal the primary surplus required to keep the debt-GDP ratio from rising in all but the worst 50, 25, and 10 percent of circumstances. Such a value-at-risk approach presents a clearer menu of policy options than do frameworks currently in use.