🇫🇷🇨🇭 France is now widely described as the sick man of Europe, yet Switzerland is rarely mentioned as a compelling counterfactual. The two countries followed almost identical fiscal paths between 1990 and 2000, with Switzerland also carrying substantial public debt by the standards of the time and facing a rising debt trajectory. In 2001, however, Switzerland enshrined an optimal fiscal rule in its constitution and subsequently implemented it to the letter, with extraordinary results. The question remains the same, why does the economics profession not study the Swiss case more thoroughly?