中国地方政府债务可持续、财政空间与经济增长*

根据Ghosh et al（2013）财政空间理论，利用2010—2019中国省级面板数据，对中国省级政府债务可持续、财政空间和经济增长之间的关系及其机制进行了研究。结果表明，中国个别省份出现了财政疲劳现象，要把控好债务风险雷区，但各地区债务限额存在异质性，在不损害可持续性的情况下，大部分地方政府有足够的“回旋余地”实施财政刺激政策。我国省级政府的财政空间和经济增长之间存在倒“U”型关系，即当政府负债率高于财政空间的临界点（或较低的财政空间）时开始阻碍经济增长，因此，需要通过降低政府负债率实现更高的增长。进一步研究发现，政府债务影响经济增长最重要的渠道是公共投资和私人投资，全要素生产率、储蓄和长期真实利率也是政府债务影响经济增长的重要渠道，而长期名义利率未能成为政府债务影响经济增长的渠道。     

Debt Policy Rules in an Open Economy

In a small open economy model of endogenous growth with public capital accumulation, we examine the effects of a debt policy rule under which the government must reduce its debt–GDP ratio if it exceeds the criterion level. To sustain public debt at a finite level, the government should adjust public spending rather than the income tax rate. The long‐run debt–GDP ratio should be kept sufficiently low to avoid equilibrium indeterminacy. Under sustainability and determinacy, a tighter (looser) debt rule brings welfare gains when the world interest rate is relatively high (low).     

Regime changes and fiscal sustainability in Kenya

Kenya's fiscal policy landscape is characterized by primary deficit spending forcing the government to rely on debt to meet its objectives. The justification often being that as a developing economy, annual growth rates and future prospects may in the short run justify the uptake of debt to finance infrastructural development. However, given potential fiscal limits, fiscal cycles usually alternates between sustainable and unsustainable regimes and this has a bearing on long run sustainability. This study therefore sought to investigate the nature of fiscal policy regime in Kenya and the extent to which fiscal policy is sustainable in the long run taking into account periodic regime shifts. Markov switching models were used to endogenously determine fiscal policy regimes. Regime switching tests were used to test whether No-Ponzi game condition and debt stabilizing condition were met. The results established that regime switching model was suitable in explaining regime sustainable and unsustainable cycles. An investigation of fiscal policy regimes established that both sustainable and unsustainable regimes were dominant, and each lasted for an average of four years. There was evidence to imply the existence of procyclical fiscal policy in Kenya. Regime switching tests for long run sustainability suggested that the No-Ponzi game condition weakly holds in the Kenyan economy. Regime-based sensitivity analysis indicated that persistence of unsustainability regime for more than 4 years could threaten long-run fiscal sustainability.     

ECONOMIC AND BUDGET ISSUES FOR DEFICIT POLICY

Much of the controversy about reducing the federal deficit has arisen because policymakers lack a deficit policy that is a consistent part of broader macroeconomic policy. This is not surprising since economists have not reached a consensus about such a policy.
This paper sketches the analytical controversy about monetary and fiscal policies and traces it to issues about how the economy works. Although aspects of the deficit question are controversial, there is general concern about the buildup of federal debt implicit in the projection of persistently large deficits. A growing body of research suggests that the increase in the federal debt-to-income ratio may impinge dangerously on the credit available to finance private capital formation. Also, the rising federal debt may indirectly generate inflation through monetization.
Several criteria and approaches to a deficit policy are identified. The paper suggests that changing the "policy mix" by tightening fiscal policy and loosening monetary policy to reduce interest rates is unlikely to succeed to the extent that expansive monetary policy increases real interest rates by raising inflationary expectations and uncertainty.
Since the potential ill effects of the federal debt buildup, are essentially long-run and bear on capital accumulation, any tax increases should avoid disincentives to saving, investment, and to growth generally. Depending on revenue requirements, fundamental changes in the tax system may be necessary. Further reductions in spending appear to be inevitable if the projected rise in the debt-to-GNP ratio is to be halted. Defense, retirement, and medical care programs are most likely candidates for reduction.     

Fiscal position and the financing of productive government expenditures: an application to Latin America

Government spending on public infrastructure, education, and health care can increase economic growth. However, the appropriate financing depends on a country’s fiscal position. We develop a two-sector endogenous growth model to explore how variations in the composition and financing of government expenditures affect economic growth. We find that, when tax rates are moderate, funding public investment by raising taxes may increase long-run growth. If existing tax rates are high, public investment is only growth enhancing if funded by restructuring the composition of overall public spending. Additionally, public investment that is debt financed can have adverse effects on long-run growth due to the resulting increases in interest rates and debt-servicing costs.     

Fiscal policy,government debt,and economic growth in the Kaleckian model of growth and distribution

This article presents the Kaleckian model of growth and distribution that sets a budget deficit ratio as an indicator of fiscal policy and examines the short- and long-run effects of an increase in budget deficits and a rise in income tax rates on the economy. The key short-run outcomes are as follows. First, expanded budget deficits have a positive effect on the rate of capacity utilization. Second, the tax rate for wage income does not affect the rate of capacity utilization, whereas the tax rate for capital income has a favorable impact on it. This result implies that raising the tax rate for capital income can be an important policy instrument for stimulating the economy. Third, we find that the economy exhibits a wage-led aggregate demand in the short run. The main long-run results are as follows. First, the effect of expanded budget deficits on the growth rate is ambiguous, since a higher debt burden negatively influences the rate of capacity utilization and hence economic growth, despite the increase in demand caused by government borrowing. A higher budget deficit ratio thus raises the growth rate only if a certain condition is satisfied. Second, the tax rate for capital income has a positive impact on the growth rate. Third, the economy shows a wage-led growth in the long run.     

Monetary policy and transmission mechanism in Brazil: an empirical model

We propose an econometric model for the transmission mechanism in Brazil after the inflation target regime (IT) implementation. We follow the statistical approach based on the LSE methodology by means of the Spanos (J Econom 44:87–105, 1990) categorization. Our proposed model includes the ratios of the debt and primary surplus to the GDP representing the government fiscal effort. We identify two long run relationships that produce new information on how to evaluate the real interest rate and the nominal interest rate links, respectively, with the output gap and the nominal inflation derived from the IS and the interest rule theoretical models. Such specification explores the role played by fiscal variables in monetary transmission; considering the government fiscal effort, a relevant issue for Brazil. We were also able to identify a third long run relationship that might help to uncover how output gap is related not only with nominal variables but also with the debt to the GDP ratio.     

Assessing fiscal episodes

In an OCDE panel, for the period 1970–2010, we assess the effects of fiscal consolidation episodes, with four different definitions. Our results reveal that lower final government consumption increases private consumption in three out of the four approaches, when a fiscal consolidation occurs, and the debt ratio is above the cross-country average. The magnitude of these coefficients is higher for countries with lower debt levels, implying more successful consolidations associated with reduced crowding-out effects. There is some evidence of non-Keynesian effects for both private consumption and private investment, and the effects of social transfers on private investment tend to be negative, both in the short and long run. In a financial crisis, such effects are also more prone to happen. Finally, raising long-term interest rates reduces per capita private investment.     

FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY OF JAPAN: A DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM APPROACH

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the fiscal sustainability of Japan by applying a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to the Japanese economy. By introducing intermediation costs into the model, we succeed in explaining the observed relationship between the interest and GDP growth rates, which is crucial in testing for sustainability. When the projected real growth rate is 2.5%, the average real interest rate becomes 2.57%, and the debt‐to‐GDP ratio gradually increases stochastically so that government debt is not sustainable. To recover sustainability, the primary surplus must be 0.2% of GDP.     

The trade-off between public debt reduction and automatic stabilisation

This paper addresses the basic tradeoff between the stabilisation properties of budgets and the sustainability of long run fiscal positions. The modeling framework consists of a simple non-monetary endowment economy with overlapping generations, extended to account for stochastic endowments and borrowing constrained households. A benign government chooses the optimal degree of responsiveness of net taxes to individual incomes and an optimal measure of long-run public debt in order to smooth households' consumption across states of nature. In the presence of a deficit constraint for the government, the results point to the desire for lower debt levels than those currently prevailing in European Union countries in order to enable a more effective hedging of personal income uncertainty by means of more active automatic fiscal stabilisers. The optimal degree of automatic stabilisation and debt reduction is conditional on the characteristics of economic cycles.     

Public debt accumulation and fiscal consolidation

In this study, we analyse the relationship between interest rates on government bonds (GB) and the fiscal consolidation rule by using an overlapping generation model with endogenous and stochastic growth settings. Our key findings are summarized as follows. First, contrary to conventional view, we find that interest rates on GB may decline as public debt accumulates relative to private capital. Second, the simulation reveals that the economy may exhibit discrete changes with divergent interest rates, implying that the observed trend of relatively low interest rates on GB with public debt accumulation may not continue indefinitely in the future. Third, fiscal consolidation rule plays a key role in determining equilibrium interest rates.     

The effects of fiscal consolidations on the composition of government spending

ABSTRACT

In response to increasing debt paths, governments often implement fiscal consolidation programs. This paper studies the impact of these programs on the composition of government spending. System-GMM estimations performed on a sample of 53 developed and emerging countries over 1980–2011 reveal that fiscal consolidations significantly reduce the government investment-to-consumption ratio, i.e. a composition effect. Robust to a wide set of tests, including when using the narrative approach to identify fiscal consolidations, this significantly stronger contraction of government investment with respect to government consumption is at work particularly when debt is high and in the low phase of the economic cycle. Therefore, in such contexts, fiscal consolidations aimed at short-run stabilization may hurt the economy in the long-run through their detrimental effect on public investment, calling for a reflection upon how they could be re-designed to allow avoiding such undesirable consequences.     

Monetary policy and fiscal limits with no-default

This paper discusses monetary and fiscal policy interactions that stabilize government debt. Two distortions prevail in the model economy: income taxes and liquidity constraints. Possible obstructions to fiscal policy include a ceiling on the equilibrium debt-to-GDP ratio, zero or negative elasticity of tax revenues, and a political intolerance of raising tax rates. At the fiscal limit two mechanisms restore solvency: fiscal inflation, which reduces the real value of nominal debt, and open market operations, which diminish the size of government debt held by the private sector. Three regimes achieve this goal. In all regimes monetary policy is passive. In all regimes a muted tax response to government debt is consistent with equilibrium. The propensity of a fiscal authority to smooth output is found to determine what is an acceptable response (in the form of tax rate changes) to the level of government debt, while monetary policy determines the timing and magnitude of fiscal inflation. Impulse responses show that the inflation and tax hikes needed to offset a permanent shock to transfers are lowest under nominal interest rate pegs. In this regime, most of the reduction in the real value of government debt comes from open market purchases.     

未来25年全球政府债务展望:对经济和公共政策的影响

文章探讨了主要经济体以及全世界的长期财政前景。文章认为,如果当前的税率或政府的退休和卫生保健惠民工程没有发生变化,未来25年政府债务规模将在大多数发达经济体和许多新兴经济体中增长到危险和不可持续的水平。虽然对于主要的经济体来说,在经济增长不出现任何大的、出乎意料的负面震荡的情况下,危险区很可能还比较远,大约会发生在今后10～25年时间内,但如果允许政府债务继续增长,利率最终将上升,从而挤出生产性投资,降低经济增长率。严重的经济下滑有可能迅速推动政府债务水平上升到危险区间,并极大地增加爆发危机的可能性。因此,政策制定者现在就应该开始计划进程,将政府债务调整到可持续的轨道。当前计划中的预算削减应该延迟到2013～2015年执行,额外的预算削减措施也应该从2016年开始实行。此外,应该立刻在控制退休和医疗成本方面达成一致,认真解决这个威胁到增长的问题。     

Optimal fiscal and monetary policies in the face of rare disasters

This paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policies in an economy exposed to large adverse shocks (rare disasters). We contrast optimal policies under commitment and discretion and identify several striking differences between these institutional environments. A government that can commit to its policy plans relies heavily on debt to smooth the adverse effects of large shocks over time. Lack of commitment seriously limits the government's ability to use debt as a shock absorber. Under discretion, an increase in debt leads to an increase in inflation expectations and therefore higher nominal interest rate distortions. Hence, the discretionary government keeps debt in close vicinity of its steady-state level, and the response of taxes, inflation, and interest rates to shocks is much more pronounced under discretion than under commitment. This is particularly relevant for large shocks and when the initial stock of government debt is already high at the time the shock occurs. We also argue that the adverse welfare effects of disasters are larger under discretion than under commitment, but these welfare differentials can be significantly reduced by making the discretionary government inflation averse.     

Public debt in a basic endogenous growth model

We work out the mechanism that makes public debt affect the allocation of resources in the long-run. To do so we analyze an AK growth model with elastic labor supply and a government sector. The government levies a distortionary income tax and issues bonds to finance lump-sum transfers and non-distortionary public spending. We show that the long-run growth rate is the smaller the higher the debt ratio if the government adjusts public spending to fulfill its inter-temporal budget constraint. If the government adjusts lump-sum transfers the public debt ratio does not affect the balanced growth rate.     

A segmented trend model to assess fiscal sustainability: The US experience 1929–2009

The academic literature has focused largely on testing for long-run fiscal sustainability. In this exercise we formulate a flexible regression model that can be used to assess the sustainability of a more recent build-up of fiscal deficits and debt that would be of major concern to policy makers. The analysis of US data shows that, after adjusting for some fundamentals, the gross Federal debt–income ratio has been growing at an unsustainable rate of 4 % per year since 2007. The net debt–income ratio does not show such a significant trend. Since not all government assets are readily available to reduce debt, significant positive trends in the gross debt–income ratio calls for policy actions.     

Do departures from democratic accountability compromise the stability of public finances? Keynesianism, central banking, and minority governments in the Canadian system of party government, 1867–2009

This paper is concerned with the effectiveness of Westminster parliamentary institutions in ensuring the stability of a nation??s public finances. Our starting point and major hypothesis is that the governance structure embodied in Canada??s parliamentary system has contributed importantly to the maintenance of fiscal stability. The fact that the Government of Canada, like the central government of many other modern democracies, has survived for over a century without default on its public debt means that in some meaningful sense, long run responsibility with respect to the nation??s finances has in fact been achieved, and we show that this is in fact the case. Hence a more meaningful test of our main hypothesis requires the designation of specific sub-periods when the ideological background for political policy making changed and/or when the institutions and organizations for operationalizing policy varied in ways that either improved or discouraged responsible fiscal performance. We consider ideational and institutional factors that are predicted to either enhance or detract from accountability and fiscal stability, including central banking, the adoption of Keynesianism, inflation targeting and periods of minority government, and test for their effects on long run stability of the debt to GDP ratio using data for almost the entire history of the modern state from 1867 to 2008.     

Sovereign default and the sustainability risk premium effect

We analyze the joint determination of interest rate risk and debt sustainability for governments with fiscal imbalances. Because higher interest rates imply increased debt services, they worsen the government's financial situation and increase the probability of sovereign default. Thus, higher interest rates eventually lead to a decrease in the real demand for government bonds, which imposes an additional constraint on government debt sustainability.     

The impact of government debt on the long-run natural real interest rate – a quantitative evaluation

Persistently low natural real interest rates are a problem for monetary policy and financial stability. I analyse to what extent a permanent increase in government debt that is financed by higher taxes could raise the long-run natural real interest rate. As a measurement tool, I use an incomplete markets model with capital and government bonds. Increasing the public debt/GDP ratio by one percentage point raises the real interest rate by between 0.4 and 1.5 basis points, depending on the degree of inequality generated by the model and the tax instrument used to balance the government’s budget constraint. I also show that the interest rate effect of a change in public debt/GDP predicted by the model is significantly smaller than its empirical counterpart for the US, due to the fact that the model understates the empirical fraction of households that are constrained in their consumption decision.