We study the implications of changes in the mix of taxes, public spending, and public finance in the Eurozone. In so doing, we build a general equilibrium OLG model that naturally incorporates all the main categories of public spending and taxes. We focus on the medium- and long-run implications of permanent reforms in the actual policy mix. When we depart from 2008, the best way out of the recession would be an increase in public spending on education and health and in turn cuts in distorting taxes including social security contributions. When we depart from the year 2017, which features a higher inherited public debt, public debt consolidation becomes the superior reform to the extent that the focus is on the medium and long run.

Despite the central government's efforts in reducing fiscal burdens on peasants through fiscal reforms in the early 2000s, collective petitions in rural China remain. Complementary to the arbitrary and weak government explanations of state–society conflict, this article reveals the role of village cadres as activists in collective petition. Drawn from extensive fieldwork, I argue that by reducing local government revenues and recentralizing fiscal autonomy to the county level, central fiscal reforms have unintentionally induced a new force of resistance: village cadres. Being disenfranchised from previous privileges, village cadres are now allies rather than adversaries of peasant petitions. This article advances existing literature on China's contentious politics in two ways. First, it recognizes a new group of activists whose savoir-faire improves peasant knowledge of the state capacity in containing state–society conflict. Second, it proposes a dynamic understanding of contentious politics by highlighting the shifting boundaries between the state and society.