Government response to increased demand for public services: The cyclicality of government health expenditures in the OECD

The more that health care expenditures are financed by general taxation, the greater the discretion governments are likely to exercise when timing increases in health care expenditures. Vote-maximising governments time increases in health care expenditures to occur in economic upturns, when voters are not as aware of the required increase in taxation. In recessions, they have an incentive to sustain expenditures on health care by diverting expenditures from other public expenditure programmes that voters perceive as low priority. In this way, government pursuit of a political agenda is likely to exert a systematic influence on the cyclicality of government expenditure. Predictions are tested with reference to the cyclicality of government health expenditures, for a sample of OECD countries from 2000 to 2012.     

OPTIMAL ADJUSTMENT OF THE COMPOSITION OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

This paper analyses how the composition of public expenditure should be adjusted to maximize the economic growth rate in developing countries. We first apply a theoretical framework to empirical data from 50 countries. We then demonstrate how each country should adjust public expenditure for the purpose of maximizing growth. Results show that developing countries in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe have generally misallocated public expenditures in favour of defence, at the expense of public services. Other region‐specific results suggest that Asian developing countries should increase expenditure on education, and that Middle Eastern countries should decrease expenditure on education in favour of health.     

Growth and Welfare Effects of Tax Cuts: The Case of a Productive Public Input with Technological Risk

This paper analyzes the dynamic impact of tax cuts within a stochastic model of endogenous growth with a congested public input. A decreasing taxation of deterministic income parts leads to the well-known positive growth effect. Nevertheless, due to the insurance effect associated with the taxation of stochastic income flows, the overall growth impact of taxation is ambiguous. It is shown that the optimal structure of financing government expenditure does not only depend on the degree of rivalry but also on the degree of risk aversion. The optimal real value of government debt decreases with a rise in congestion. We identify that in the case of proportional congestion, the base for tax cuts should be the growth neutral consumption tax. Maximizing the growth rate does not automatically coincide with maximizing welfare. Hence, the base for tax cuts gains importance to realize a welfare optimal policy.     

Growth effects of public expenditure on the state and local level: evidence from a sample of rich governments

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the relationship between government size and economic growth. But the empirical evidence of growth effects of public expenditure using cross-country regressions is still inconclusive. According to a number of authors this is not surprising since the negative relationship only applies for rich countries with a large public sector. Restricting their analysis on rich countries only they can show the predicted negative impact. Naturally, a selection of a sub-sample of rich countries is always somewhat arbitrary. Another possibility is to concentrate on governments within a rich country. However, only few studies investigate the effect of state and local spending on economic growth. This study concentrates on the relationship between public expenditure and economic growth within a rich country using the full sample of state and local governments from Switzerland over the 1981–2001 period. The general finding is a fairly robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. However, in contrast to public spending from operating budgets there is no significant impact on economic growth by expenditure from capital budgets.     

财政纵向失衡、公共支出结构与经济增长*

全面深化财税体制改革释放体制红利是助推地方经济增长与民生福祉增进的关键所在。为此,本文首先从理论层面系统诠释财政纵向失衡对经济增长的作用机制,继而通过构建动态面板联立方程模型将财政纵向失衡、公共支出结构与经济增长同时纳入分析框架,实证探究财政纵向失衡对地方经济增长的影响效应,而后通过进一步标准化回归估计考察财政纵向失衡对经济增长的作用渠道与传导效应。研究发现财政纵向失衡不仅通过直接作用渠道显著降低经济增长,还通过作用于地方政府公共支出结构间接对经济增长产生负向抑制效应。     

Top marginal taxation and economic growth

The article explores the relationship between top marginal tax rates on personal income and economic growth. Using a data set of consistently measured top marginal tax rates for a panel of 18 OECD countries over the period 1965–2009, this article finds evidence in favour of a quadratic top tax–growth relationship. This represents the first reported evidence of a nonmonotonic significant relationship between top marginal income tax rates and economic growth. The point estimates of the regressions suggest that the marginal effect of higher top tax rates becomes negative above a growth-maximizing tax rate in the order of 60%. As top marginal tax rates observed after 1980 are below the estimated growth-maximizing level in most of the countries considered, a positive linear relationship between top marginal tax rates and GDP growth is found over the sub-period 1980–2009. Overall, results show that raising top marginal tax rates which are below their growth maximizing has the largest positive impact on growth when the related additional revenues are used to finance productive public expenditure, reduce budget deficits or reduce some other form of distortionary taxation.     

Public–private mix of health expenditure: A political economy and quantitative analysis

This paper constructs a simple model to examine decisions on public and private health spending under majority voting. In the model, agents with heterogeneous incomes choose how much to consume and spend on health care and vote for public health expenditure. The health status of an agent is determined by a CES composite of public and private health expenditure. The existence and uniqueness of the voting equilibrium are established. A quantitative exercise reveals the importance of the relative effectiveness of public and private health expenditure and their substitutability in determining the public‐private mix of health expenditure and in accounting for the observed differences across a sample of 22 advanced democratic countries.     

Health care expenditure and economic growth: Quantile panel-type analysis

This study uses international total health care expenditure data of 31 countries from 1986 to 2007 for exploring the causality between an increase in health care expenditure and economic growth. The empirical procedure is divided into two parts. The first is the panel regression analysis and the second is the quantile regression analysis. The estimation of the panel regression reveals that, expenditure growth will stimulate economic growth; however, economic growth will reduce expenditure growth. With regard to the estimation of quantile regression, when economic growth is quantile, in countries with low level of growth, the influence of expenditure growth on economic growth is different. In countries with medium and high levels of economic growth, the influence of expenditure growth on economic growth is positive; when health care expenditure growth is quantile, the influence of economic growth on expenditure growth is more different.     

The effect of health investment on growth: A causality analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of health investment on productivity as an important variable associated with human capital accumulation. The authors also study the possible existence of endogeneity by using instrumental variables estimation. The results that are obtained may be interpreted as evidence of the positive impact of health expenditure on income growth. Furthermore, the authors looked at the bounded gains of health status and divided the sample according to the median of total health expenditure and found that the countries with lower levels of health spending obtain larger benefits when the other determinants of growth are held constant.     

How does public spending affect technical efficiency? Some evidence from 15 European countries

The relationship between government size and economic growth has been widely debated. Revisiting the subject from a distinct angle with respect to the mainstream approach, we provide an empirical analysis of the impact of government size on technical efficiency. The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of public sector's size and of public expenditure components on 15 European countries’ technical efficiency from 1996 to 2014 by using a True Random Effect model. Using the total public expenditure as a proxy for the government size we estimate simultaneously national optimal production function and technical efficiency by controlling for income distribution and institutional quality. Our main findings show that the effect of public sector's size on efficiency is positive while the type of public expenditures may have both positive and negative impact. In more details, results suggest that education and health expenditures have a positive effect on technical efficiency, while others have a negative impact.     

Foreign direct investment,tax competition and social expenditure

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that redistributive social welfare state policies are valued by multinationals as, for instance, they may signal a government's commitment to social stability.     

公共资本性支出、经常性支出与内生经济增长

本文基于一个含有两类不同产出能力的公共商品的内生增长模型,通过数理分析得出在市场经济条件下最优公共支出结构的依据是公共商品各自的产出弹性.进而采用面板数据模型对13个发达国家1972～2009年的公共支出实践进行了实证研究.实证结果表明,经常性(资本性)支出对经济增长有正(负)效应.该研究结论为平衡预算下的公共支出结构决策提供了参考依据.     

税收、财政支出与内生经济增长

构建了基于财政支出、税收的内生经济增长模型,并推导出在给定税收、财政支出政策的变化路径时,经济会达到"竞争性分散均衡",税率与经济增长存在"倒-U"型关系,政府投资性支出与经济增长之间正相关。利用中国省际面板数据进行实证检验显示,在我国经济运行中,总产出、消费、投资、政府投资性支出、税率、利息率、工资水平之间存在长期均衡关系。我国宏观税率为28.63%时达到最优值,政府投资性支出对经济增长率存在正向影响,但不同区域间存在较大差异性。     

Mind the gap: Disparity in redistributive preference between political elites and the public in China

In this research, we emphasize the importance of studying the gap in redistributive preference between political elites and the public because of the strategic roles played by the former in policy processes. We use China as a case study, wherein the fulfillment of surging demands for redistribution is largely dependent on whether or not the political elites will advocate for redistribution. Using data from the Chinese General Social Survey, we find that the political elites prefer significantly less progressive taxation and less redistributive expenditure than the public. The gap in redistributive preference is larger on the expenditure side than on the taxation side. Moreover, the causes of the gap appear to vary by the measures for redistribution. Accounting for covariate differences fully explains the gap in preference for progressive taxation, but not the gap in preference for redistributive expenditure.     

Economic growth and budgetary components: a panel assessment for the EU

In this article, we test to determine whether a reallocation of government budgetary components can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of 15 EU countries. We apply panel data techniques to the period 1971–2006, and use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total factor productivity and labour productivity. Our results also identify the distortions induced by public expenditure in the private factors allocation. In particular, we detect a strong crowding-in effect associated to public investment, which has enhanced economic growth by boosting private investment. We also associate a dependence of productivity on public expenditure on social security.     

论全面深化财税体制改革背景下事权和支出责任分离

原有分税制改革受各种因素制约,制度框架继承了各级政府间原有的支出事项,与事权的关联考虑不多,缺乏明晰的事权和支出责任规范划分的政治机制,同时政府间财政收入的分配格局并未伴随财政职能的下放而发生根本性变革,产生了政府间事权、支出责任、财权、财力不相适应的矛盾,引致事权重叠交叉、事权与支出责任分离、事权与财权不匹配、事权与财力不确定等问题,带来制度激励偏离公共性和治理失效的风险,亟待全面深化财税体制改革,建立事权和支出责任相适应的制度,以更好发挥中央和地方两个积极性,促进政府治理整体效能最大化。     

Does Taxation Stifle Corporate Investment? Firm‐Level Evidence from ASEAN Countries

This article conducts a firm‐level analysis of the effect of taxation on corporate investment, using large‐scale panel data on non‐financial firms over the period 1990–2014, and controlling for macrostructural differences among ASEAN countries. We find a significant degree of persistence in fixed investment over time, which varies with firm characteristics, such as size, growth prospects, profitability and leverage. The non‐linear estimations indicate that taxation facilitates business investment (possibly by enabling public investment in infrastructure and human capital, and the proper functioning of government institutions), but this effect turns negative and stifles private investment growth as the tax burden increases.     

Health spending and public pension: evidence from panel data

This article empirically investigates the determinants of aggregate health expenditure in a panel of OECD countries from 1980 to 2005. We differ from most existing studies by testing some new determinants motivated by recent theoretical advances in the literature. We find that a one percentage increase in public pension payments per elderly person leads to approximately a one third percentage increase in aggregate health spending, and this effect is significant and robust across a variety of model specifications. A back of the envelope calculation based on this estimate suggests that the expansion of the public pension programme on average accounts for approximately over one fifth of the rise in aggregate health expenditure as a share of GDP in the set of OECD countries during 1980–2005. In addition, we find that the estimated effect of GDP per capita in our model ranges from 0.66 to 0.80, which is consistent with the results from some recent studies, and thus further reinforces the finding in the literature that health care is not a luxury good.     

A pigovian rule for the optimum provision of public goods

The integrated treatment of optimal taxation and public expenditure presented here is based on the dual relationship between the prices of private goods and the quantities of public goods. The conditions for optimum public good provision can be expressed as a modification of the Samuelson conditions with extra terms representing (a) the distortionary effect of taxes on the willingness to pay for the public good, and (b) distributional effects. The former captures Pigou's notion of the indirect damage caused by the need to finance public expenditure out of distortionary taxes, and we call this the ‘Pigou term’. In certain cases a very simple benefit-cost ratio for public projects emerges that is equivalent to measuring benefits as if they were taxed.     

Optimal taxation in an endogenous growth model with variable population and public expenditure

In this paper we analyze second-best optimal taxation in an endogenous-growth model driven by public expenditure, in presence of endogenous fertility and labor supply. Normative analysis shows positive taxes on the number of children, which are necessary to correct for congestion in the publicly provided input (such as education and healthcare), negative public debt. Results on capital and labor income taxation depend on whether the public input is optimally provided.