Extraordinary Measures: The Role of Debt Levels in Fiscal Policy Responses to Covid-19

We use SVAR models for 18 economies to estimate how much fiscal policy deviated from pre-pandemic norms during the Covid-19 pandemic. For most countries, fiscal policy was more expansive than the pre-pandemic norm predicts based on the state of the economy during the pandemic. The size of the deviation from the pre-pandemic norm is not related to the level of government debt on the eve of the pandemic, as fiscal space concepts would predict.