Macro‐Fiscal Volatility and the Composition of Public Spending*

Earlier empirical literature has examined some long‐ and medium‐term aspects of macro‐fiscal volatility while leaving its short‐term fiscal impact unexplored. To help fill that gap, we examine the impact of macro‐fiscal volatility on the composition of public spending. To that end, we analyse a panel of 10 EU countries during 1991–2007. Our results suggest that increases in the volatility of regularly‐collected and cyclical revenues such as the VAT and income taxes tend to tilt the expenditure composition in favour of public investment. In contrast, increases in the volatility of ad hoc taxes such as capital taxes tend to favour public consumption spending, albeit only a little. We interpret such volatility innovations as conveying news to the fiscal policymaker about the underlying economic conditions, with especially regularly‐collected and cyclical taxes prompting short‐term cyclical fine‐tuning.     

Heterogeneous Consumers and Fiscal Policy Shocks

This paper studies empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that differ depending on individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey to estimate individual‐level responses and multipliers for government spending. We find that unexpected fiscal shocks have substantially different effects on consumers depending on their income and age levels: the wealthiest individuals tend to behave according to predictions of standard Real Business Cycle (RBC) models, whereas the poorest ones behave according to standard IS–LM (non‐Ricardian) models, most likely due to credit constraints. Furthermore, government spending policy shocks tend to decrease consumption inequality.     

Public Investment in Europe: Evolution and Determinants in perspective*

We describe the evolution of public investment and public capital stocks in Europe over the past three decades. Against this background, we analyse the macroeconomic determinants of public investment, with a special focus on its long‐term trend. We find that public investment has been determined by national income, the stance of budgetary policies and fiscal sustainability considerations. Neither the cost of financing nor the fiscal rules embodied in EMU have had a systemic impact on public investment. The significant downtrend that characterises the evolution of public investment in non‐cohesion countries is chiefly determined by drawn‐out episodes of fiscal consolidation, unrelated to EMU.     

Who Will Pay for Long‐Term Care in the UK? Projections Linking Macro‐ and Micro‐Simulation Models

The long‐term care funding system continues to attract much debate in the UK. We produce projections of state and private long‐term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state‐financed care, through innovative linking of macro‐ and micro‐simulation models. Variant assumptions about life expectancy, dependency and care costs are examined and the impact of universal state‐financed (‘free’) personal care, based on need but not ability to pay, is investigated. We find that future long‐term care expenditure is subject to considerable uncertainty and is particularly sensitive to assumed future trends in real input costs. On a central set of assumptions, free personal care would, by 2051, increase public spending on long‐term care from 1.1 per cent of GDP to 1.3 per cent, or more if it generated an increase in demand. Among the care‐home population aged 85 or over, the immediate beneficiaries of free personal care would be those with relatively high incomes.     

Fueling fiscal interactions: commodity price shocks and local government spending in Colombia

This paper explores fiscal interactions in a developing country. We analyze whether public expenditures in neighboring municipalities influence local spending decisions within a comprehensive set of expenditure categories. Our analysis is based on panel data covering the universe of Colombian municipalities from 2000 to 2010. We offer a quasi-experimental identification strategy exploiting exogenous variation in municipalities’ exposure to changes in the world market price of oil, depending on the municipalities’ endowment with oil resources and controlling for municipality fixed effects. While we find evidence of strong spatial autocorrelation of total local public spending as well as in almost all expenditure categories, the quasi-experimental approach reveals that there are no significant causal fiscal interaction effects between municipalities. This highlights the importance of using additional sources of exogenous variation for the identification of fiscal interactions. In the developing country context, our findings suggest that fiscal decentralization policies do not lead to a race to the bottom in local public expenditures.     

防控“新冠肺炎”疫情的财税政策研究

突如其来的“新冠肺炎”疫情对我国宏观经济的平稳运行特别是对中小企业的经营以及就业都会产生较大的影响。在这场防控疫情的斗争中,财政税收政策将发挥重要的作用,但无论是减税还是增支都将会加大财政的赤字率。在2020年这个特殊时期,国家可以考虑突破3%的财政赤字率,但从长期来看,未来也不应该搞结构性赤字,因为这将导致巨大的政府债务。为了应对疫情,国家应当在加大宏观政策调节的力度、加大对公共卫生领域的投入、缓解企业经营困难以及实施好就业优先政策方面出台相应的财税政策。     

Fiscal Policy Shocks in the Euro Area and the US: An Empirical Assessment*

We analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly‐available quarterly data set of fiscal variables for the period 1981–2007. To allow for comparability with previous results on euro‐area countries and the US, we use a standard structural vector autoregressive (VAR) framework, and study the impact of aggregated and disaggregated government spending and net‐tax shocks. In addition, to frame euro‐area results, we apply the same methodology for the same sample period to US data. We also explore the sensitivity of the results to the inclusion of variables aiming to control for underlying financial and fiscal conditions. The main new findings are that: expansionary fiscal shocks have a short‐term positive impact on GDP and private consumption, with government spending shocks entailing, in general, higher effects on economic activity than (net) tax reductions; output multipliers to government expenditure shocks are of similar size in the euro area and in the US; the persistence of a fiscal spending shock is higher in the US than in the euro area, which appears to be related to military spending in the US; and fiscal multipliers have increased over the recent past in both geographical areas.     

Fiscal Stimulus in Times of High Debt: Reconsidering Multipliers and Twin Deficits

We investigate the impact of fiscal stimuli at different levels of the government debt‐to‐GDP ratio for a sample of 17 European countries from 1970 to 2010. This is implemented in an interacted panel VAR framework in which all coefficient parameters are allowed to change continuously with the debt‐to‐GDP ratio. We find that responses to government spending shocks exhibit strong nonlinear behavior. While the overall cumulative effect of a spending shock on real GDP is positive and significant at moderate debt‐to‐GDP ratios, this effect turns negative as the ratio increases. The total cumulative effect on the trade balance as a share of GDP is negative at first but switches sign at higher levels of debt. Consequently, depending on the degree of public indebtedness, our results accommodate long‐run fiscal multipliers that are greater and smaller than one or even negative as well as twin deficit and twin divergence behavior within one sample and time period. From a policy perspective, these results lend additional support to increased prudence at high public debt ratios because the effectiveness of fiscal stimuli to boost economic activity or resolve external imbalances may not be guaranteed.     

Should central government seek to control the level of local authority expenditures?

Should local authorities be free to determine their expenditure, provided they finance changes in spending by changes in local taxation? We set up a theoretical framework to analyse this issue, and discuss three arguments that have been put forward for central control of such spending. The first relates to tax spillovers, the second to distributional effects combined with imperfect local democracy and the third considers self‐interested local politicians. While these arguments cannot be entirely dismissed, they are subject to numerous qualifications and, if correct, would imply the desirability of a number of policies other than expenditure capping.     

The Distributional Impact of the Greek Crisis in 2010*

The severe economic crisis affecting Greece is widely thought to be having a significant social impact in terms of greater inequality and increased poverty. We provide an early assessment of whether (and to what extent) this was the case in 2010, the first year of the Greek crisis. We distinguish between two interrelated factors: on the one hand, the austerity policies taken to reduce fiscal deficits; on the other hand, the wider recession. Using a tax–benefit model, we attempt to quantify the distributional implications of both. With respect to the austerity policies, we focus on the changes affecting taxation, pension benefits and public sector pay. With respect to the wider recession, we model the effects of rising unemployment and inflation, as well as of lower earnings for self-employed workers and for employees of private firms. In simulating the impact of these changes on the distribution of incomes (and in estimating how the total burden of the crisis is shared across income groups), we take into account tax evasion and benefit non-take-up. We conclude by discussing the main findings, methodological pitfalls and policy implications of our research.     

Keeping up or Falling behind? The Impact of Benefit and Tax Uprating on Incomes and Poverty*

Each year, the government decides how much to raise benefits and tax allowances. In the UK, the basis for these upratings is rarely debated, yet has major long‐term consequences for the relative living standards of different groups as well as for the public finances. This paper considers the medium‐term implications of present uprating policies, which vary across parameters of the tax–benefit system. Continuing these policies for 20 years, other things staying the same, would result in a near doubling of the child poverty rate alongside a substantial gain to the public finances. At the same time, pensioners are largely protected by the earnings indexation of pensioner benefits including, in time, the basic state pension. We show how difficult it will be to meet the UK child poverty targets unless the greater inequality inherent in the current regime for uprating payments and allowances is redressed.     

持久性减税对地方财政可持续性的动态效应研究

持久性减税可能对地方财政造成动态冲击,合理施策有利于保障地方财政可持续性。为此,选取我国2010—2019年251个地级市数据,使用熵值法从财源结构、支出效益、治理目标和区域协调四个方面构建地方财政可持续性指标,系统考察持久性减税对地方财政可持续性的短期与长期动态效应。研究发现：持久性减税短期内不利于地方财政可持续性,但从长期来看,将对地方财政可持续性产生显著的促进作用;异质性分析表明,短期内减税对地方财政可持续性的负向影响在经济发展水平更高、财政自给率更高以及产业结构高级化更强的地级市更明显,因此要更加注意施策力度。     

COMMODITY EXPORT BOOMS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

This article surveys the experiences of commodity-exportingcountries faced with resource discoveries and widely fluctuatingworld prices. Favorable developments of the commodity exportmarket often prove to be a mixed blessing, as poor boom managementleads to major internal and external economic imbalances. Manydeveloping countries overconsume during boom periods. More oftenthan not, the unsustainable increases in spending are initiatedby the public sector. When the boom ends, tardiness in decreasinggovernment spending and in increasing revenues from nonboomingsectors creates fiscal deficits and monetary control problems. In the 1970s many booming economies allowed regulated pricestructures, and particularly exchange rates, to deviate substantiallyfrom free market levels, discouraging efficient resource allocationand greatly compounding the problems of adjustment to subsequentdrops in export prices. Countries that managed booms well weretypically those that (a) did not allow fiscal variables, exchangerates, agricultural producer prices, and wages to get badlyout of line, (b) avoided indulging in wasteful and inefficientinvestment or investment that involved burdensome recurrentcosts, (c) limited increases in government spending to levelsconsistent with long–term trends in revenue collection,and (d) maintained prudent external borrowing and foreign exchangereserve policies.      

Fiscal Positions and Government Bond Yields in OECD Countries

We examine the effect of fiscal positions, both the level of debt and the fiscal balance, on long‐term government bond yields in the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD). To control for the endogenity of fiscal positions to the business cycle we utilize forward projections of fiscal positions from the OECD's Economic Outlook. In a panel regression over the period from 1988 to 2007, we find a robust and significant effect of fiscal positions on long‐term bond yields. Our estimates imply that the marginal effect of the projected deterioration of fiscal positions adds about 60 basis points to U.S. bond yields by 2015, with effects on other G‐7 bond yields generally being smaller.     

Strengthening Post‐Crisis Fiscal Credibility: Fiscal Councils on the Rise – A New Dataset

Institutions that aim to constrain policy discretion in order to promote sound fiscal policies are once again at the forefront of the policy debate. Interest in fiscal councils – independent watchdogs active in the public debate – has grown rapidly in recent years. In this paper, we present the first cross‐country dataset summarising key characteristics of fiscal councils among International Monetary Fund members. The data document a surge in the number of fiscal councils since the 2008–09 economic and financial crisis, and also illustrate that well‐designed fiscal councils are associated with stronger fiscal performance and better macro‐economic and budgetary forecasts. Key features of effective fiscal councils include operational independence from politics, the provision or public assessment of budgetary forecasts, a strong presence in the public debate and the monitoring of compliance with fiscal policy rules.     

The Distributional Implications of Income Under‐Reporting in Hungary*

The ability and inclination of specific social groups to evade tax vary widely, and this leads to considerable variation in the actual tax burden on individuals with similar levels of income. Thus, ignoring tax evasion can be seriously misleading in terms of the distributive and fiscal effects of the tax system. This paper estimates the distributional implications of income tax evasion in Hungary, based on a random sample of the administrative tax records of nearly 230,000 individuals. Gross incomes declared in the administrative tax returns are compared with incomes stated in a nationally representative household budget survey. Our estimates show that the average rate of underreporting is 9–13 per cent, though this conceals a big difference between the self‐employed (who hide the greater part of their income) and employees. The estimates are likely to be lower bounds. These rates are used in a tax– benefit microsimulation model to calculate the fiscal and distributional implications of under‐reporting. Tax evasion reduces households' personal income tax payments by about 16–20 per cent. While the poverty rate increases only slightly, income inequality rises significantly, suggesting that high‐income households tend to evade tax proportionately more. Finally, we find that tax evasion largely reduces the progressivity of the tax system.     

Spending Reversals and Fiscal Multipliers under an Interest Rate Peg

This paper examines whether fiscal stimuli are more effective when the monetary policy is less responsive to inflation. First, we provide empirical evidence suggesting that, in the period of U.S. passive monetary policy, a positive government spending shock was followed over time by a spending cut. Second, our theoretical analysis reveals that the pegged nominal interest rate is not a sufficient condition to generate a large fiscal multiplier. An increase in government spending could increase the long‐run real interest rate, if it is associated with a government spending reversal and a less responsive monetary policy. Consequently, the response of private consumption can be negative and the government spending multiplier is not necessarily greater than 1.     

The Aggregate and Distributional Effects of Financial Globalization: Evidence from Macro and Sectoral Data

We take a fresh look at the aggregate and distributional effects of policies to liberalize international capital flows—financial globalization. Both country‐ and industry‐level results suggest that such policies have led on average to limited output gains while contributing to significant increases in inequality. The country‐level results are based on 228 capital account liberalization episodes spanning 149 advanced and developing economies from 1970 to the present. Difference‐in‐difference estimation using industry‐level data for 23 advanced economies suggests that liberalization episodes reduce the share of labor income, particularly for industries with higher external financial dependence, higher natural propensity to use layoffs to adjust to idiosyncratic shocks, and higher elasticity of substitution between capital and labor.     

FISCAL DEFICITS AND MACROECONOMIC PERFORMANCE IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Although fiscal adjustment was urged on developing countriesduring the 1980s to lead them out of economic malaise, considerableuncertainty remains about the relations between fiscal policyand macroeconomic performance. To illustrate how financial markets,private spending, and the external sector react to fiscal policies,the behavior of holdings of money and public debt, private consumptionand investment, the trade balance, and the real exchange rateis modeled for a sample of ten developing countries. The studiesfind strong evidence that over the medium term, money financingof the deficit leads to higher inflation, while debt financingleads to higher real interest rates or increased repressionof financial markets, with the fiscal gains coming at increasinglyunfavorable terms. Consumers respond differently to conventionaltaxes, unconventional taxes (through inflation or interest andcredit controls), and debt financing, in ways that make fiscaladjustment the most effective means of increasing national saving.Private investment—but not private consumption—issensitive to the real interest rate, which rises under domesticborrowing to finance the deficit. Contrary to the popular presumption,in some countries private investment increases when public investmentdecreases. There is strong evidence that fiscal deficits spillover into external deficits, leading to appreciation of thereal exchange rate. Fiscal deficits and growth are self-reinforcing:good fiscal management preserves access to foreign lending andavoids the crowding out of private investment, while growthstabilizes the budget and improves the fiscal position. Thevirtuous circle of growth and good fiscal management is oneof the strongest arguments for a policy of low and stable fiscaldeficits.      

财政竞争、地方政府政策选择与经济增长——基于中国省际面板数据的实证研究

分税制背景下财政分权体制使得地方政府之间存在着激烈的财政竞争,其典型特征表现为税负、公共投入支出和公共服务支出三种政策工具之间的策略互动,从而影响各地区的经济增长。基于1997～2009年中国省级面板数据,通过估计交互项系数的符号,结果发现:地方政府的三种政策工具是相辅相成的;交互项的作用也存在着地区的差异;税负、公共服务支出和公共投入支出对经济增长有着不同的边际影响。