The availability of fiscal space has been at the centre of recent debates on the effective use of fiscal policy. This column introduces a new cross-country database of fiscal space indicators and applies it to the analysis of the evolution of fiscal space over the past quarter century and during oil price plunges. Fiscal space has weakened materially in many emerging and developing economies since the Global Crisis. Fiscal space tends to deteriorate in energy-exporting emerging and developing economies during oil price plunges but later improves, often because of procyclical fiscal tightening.