revenue to GDP (Figure 22) was seemingly not affected by the crisis and has continued to grow throughout the crisis and ensured the deficit improved back to pre-crisis levels.

The evolution of Bulgaria’s force and momentum tracks a similar path to Armenia’ and Moldova’s. The government applied large amounts of negative force to its discretionary expenditure until its momentum turned negative. Bulgaria captures this process most clearly in Figure 16 as prior to the crisis the momentum of rigid and discretionary items were exactly the same but by 2011 discretionary expenditures averaged negative momentum between 2009-11 while rigid expenditures continued to grow, although at a slower rate than previously. Similar to Moldova, Bulgaria’s fiscal deficit has yet to recover to pre-crisis levels (Figure 20). In addition economic growth (Figure 20) and revenues to GDP (Figure 22) are yet to recover however expenditure to GDP is three percent higher than it was in 2009 (Figure 23). Bulgaria’s discretionary expenditures share of the budget are only 18 percent and this provides little space for continued reductions to discretionary expenditures without having to eventually move to apply larger negative force to some rigid expenditures to improve the fiscal deficit.

# **a. Case Study: Force toolkit applied to Moldova**

In order to demonstrate the functionality of the force toolkit we examined the detailed BOOST data sets of two countries through the lens of the force toolkit that can be appended to any BOOST dataset. The two selected countries were Moldova (2006-11) and Armenia (2006-2012). The power of the force toolkit is that it equally factors growth rates and size in the budget so it can precisely identify amongst hundreds of thousands of expenditure lines the items of expenditure that mattered the most in terms of contribution to growth (momentum) or the most important items that increased in their contribution to growth (force). The alternative would be to sort through the large database simply looking at growth rates which would overstate the influence of large growth rates in tiny items in the budget or understate larger items in the budget that had low growth rates. Force and momentum convert both the shares and growth rates into convertible units that can be summed to equal total growth in the budget (momentum) or acceleration in growth (force) and thus when compared to one another the larger values are more important for growth. We demonstrate that rather than going through the 1,523 expenditure line items trying to find the source of fiscal pressures, force and momentum measures instantly draw out the sources, providing policy makers the perspective to see sources of growth across any level of detail.

In Moldova, the negative force that drove down momentum through the crisis was largely cuts in capital expenditures and transfers. Interestingly, many of these expenditure items that had the brakes applied to sharply in 2008 were more than reversed over the next three years with the accelerator pedal including capital expenditures. Figure 24 shows the largest force items between 2009 and 2011 at the three-digit level of economic classification. All five of the items incurred large negative forces in 2008 only to have the effect more than fully reversed over the next three years making them the largest sources of force in the budget over that period. From the perspective of momentum, Figure 24 demonstrates that for each of