Do Independent Fiscal Institutions Enhance or Trump Parliamentary Accountability in the Eurozone?

The new European economic governance has made the creation or reform of independent fiscal institutions compulsory, in particular for Eurozone countries. While these institutions have been subject to extensive investigation in the framework of international organisations like the World Bank, the FMI and the OECD and by the economic literature, a constitutional analysis of their prospective and actual impact on national legal systems and on the Eurozone as a whole is lacking. In fact, depending on their design, composition and powers, they could alter the ordinary inter-institutional dynamics on budgetary decisions. On the one hand, fiscal councils could redress the problem of parliament’s marginalization in budgetary procedures, within the European and the National Semesters, as well as the criticism in terms of limited parliamentary accountability in so far as they are able to provide parliaments with reliable and independent information from the executive and should mechanisms of ‘comply or explain’ be put in place. By contrast, in the event a fiscal council operates within the executive branch and is not autonomous in the exercise of its mandate, parliamentary accountability could be further jeopardized. Potentially there is also a third way independent fiscal institutions can affect democratic rule-making over the budget, namely when their powers are so far-reaching that they tend to replace the role of budgetary authorities with a technocratic-style of decision-making. Through a comparative constitutional approach and based on selected case studies (France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands), the paper aims to assess the constitutional impact, if any, of independent fiscal institutions on parliamentary accountability depending on the interplay between European and domestic norms and on the shape of the budgetary cycle in the countries at stake. Some concluding remarks will be also devoted to the European Fiscal Board and to its marginal contribution to the improvement of parliamentary accountability of the Eurozone governance.