Fiscal policy in Germany and the EU has responded to the succession of crises over the past few years with a whole arsenal of new fiscal instruments. At the European level, the debt-financed Next Generation EU package and the SURE program were precedents for jointly guaranteed European debt. However, these crisis measures are harmful to fiscal transparency: Due to the EU level debt used to finance current budgets, looking only at member states' debt is increasingly less meaningful for assessing the full debt of the respective member state.

It is the objective of this project to provide an overview of the EU fiscal landscape, in particular the new fiscal instruments created in recent years. Furthermore, the European fiscal instruments will be analyzed under the guiding principle of fiscal transparency and their impact on German government debt will be quantified. In addition, methods for improved monitoring of the national and European debt situation will be presented.