Was this time different? (Céspedes and Velasco)

Was this time different?: Fiscal policy in commodity republics by Luis Felipe Céspedes and Andrés Velasco published by BIS. “Accordinga to standard economic theory, fiscal policy should be countercyclica. In the neoclassical smoothing model of Barro (1979), a government should optimally run surpluses in good times and deficits in bad times. That is the same a government should do, though for different reasons, in the standard Keynesian or neo-Keynesian framework. Yet in practice governments often seem to follow a pro-cyclical fiscal policy.”