Rent-seeking distortions and fiscal procyclicality

Recent research has demonstrated that while government expenditures are countercyclical in most industrialized countries, they tend to be procyclical in developing countries. We develop a dynamic political-economy model to explain this phenomenon. In the model, public expenditures provide insurance to uninsured households, and optimal fiscal policy is countercyclical. The introduction of a political friction, in which successive governments disagree on the desired distribution of public spending, can lead to procyclical fiscal policies. Numerical simulations of the model allow us to compare quantitatively the relative role of common explanations for fiscal procyclicality. We conclude that political distortions in the fiscal process can explain fiscal procyclicality better than other common explanations, such as borrowing constraints and macroeconomic volatility.     

Is Fiscal Policy Sustainable in Developing Economies?

This paper investigates fiscal policy sustainability in Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela using competing methodologies. Standard unit roots and cointegration analyses do not endorse the validity of the intertemporal budget constraint. In contrast, to varying degrees across countries, alternative testing employing a fiscal policy reaction function indicates sustainability defined as surplus adjustments in response to higher debt‐to‐income ratios. Corresponding debt‐dynamics analyses show that corrective measures were put in place to revert non‐sustainable trends in government debt. However, ancillary variables in the debt modeling produce statistically weak evidence of procyclical fiscal behavior in the Latin American countries.     

THEORY OF THE STATE, GOVERNMENT TAX AND PURCHASING POLICY, AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION

Until recently, there has been virtually no discussion among professional economists of the impact of government expenditures on the distribution of income.¹ Neoclassical economics has traditionally shown little interest in distributional issues. Little is said beyond the assumption that factors are paid their marginal products. Micro economics is said to take a “neutral” stance with regard to distributional issues. Static efficiency of allocation is attainable for any income distribution, and consequently, so the parable goes, no income distribution is superior on purely economic grounds to any other. Macro economics also purports to be neutral with respect to distribution. Government expenditures in Keynes' model appear as an undifferentiated blob called “G”. The only interest macro economics takes in distribution issues is concerned with the marginal effect of redistribution on the marginal propensity to consume out of income. Keynesian economics, therefore, is unable to say whether one form of government expenditure is superior to another so long as both accomplish macro objectives. When orthodox economists have approached the issue of the government's distributional impact, they have until recently focused solely on its use of taxes and transfer payments. Public finance has traditionally ignored the expenditure side of state activity since, after all, government activity was a necessary evil, benefiting no one. Gillespie's path-breaking study in 1965 finally acknowledged the utility of government spending, but his analysis and those that have followed in the orthodox tradition have been hampered by a number of awkward premises. First, the orthodox studies of fiscal incidence implicitly accept the view of the government as a neutral arbiter rather than a protagonist of the dominant classes in society. Second, benefits of government services are assumed to be accurately measured by outlays. Thus, if we find that the government spends four times as much on highways as on police, it is assumed that the utility of highways is four times that of police even though one cannot even imagine the continuity of the status quo without the police while many responsible citizens argue that we should drastically curtail outlays on roads. Obviously, the utility of the police in terms of system maintenance exceeds that of the more expensive highway expenditures. Third, it is assumed that for each dollar spent by the government, only one person will benefit when, in fact, many disparate groups can benefit from the same expenditure. A dollar spent on education benefits the student as well as hislher employer. Fourth, Gillespie and his orthodox followers ignore any effect of the government on the pre-tax, pre-transfer distribution of income which they take as given. A hypothesis which we examine in this paper is that the government has an enormous influence over the shape of the pre-tax, pre-transfer income distribution. A more general criticism of previous studies of fiscal incidence is that they suffer from a poorly defined theory of the state. This assertion is most clzarly illustrated by the categorization in previous studies of a wide variety of public exp-enditures as “public goods” (such as national military expenditures). The benefits of these “public goods” are allocated among various income groups in several ways, for example on the basis of wealth ownership (both productive and consumptive) or on a per capita basis. The method of allocation chosen has enormous consequences for one's estimate of overall fiscal incidence. According to Herriot and Miller, those with incomes over $50,000 either receive a net benefit of 4.5 percent of their total income from the government or lose 42.1 percent, depending upon the allocation formula chosen for public goods. Previous studies have taken an agnostic position with respect to the appropriateness of the several allocative assumptions. But this is merely simple empiricism without theoreticai foundation, and thus the formulation of specific hypotheses which employ scientific procedures is impossible. What is needed to provide an interpretation of the data is a well-articulated theory of the state-an area to which we turn our attention in the next section of this paper.     

Does higher government debt link to higher social expenditure? New method,new evidence

Scholars believe that higher social expenditures are usually linked with higher government debts, whereas higher debts reduce social expenditures. However, it is reasonable to speculate that higher government debt may contribute to higher social spending, while fiscal deficits occur during a recession, which commonly creates greater demand for social expenditure. For a deeper investigation, this paper revisits the dynamic relationship between social spending and public debts in the time-frequency domain, using the novel wavelet-coherency analysis as well as the phase-difference technique to derive the co-moved and causal relationships between social spending and public debts in 13 OECD countries. The evidence identifies a dynamic relationship between variables. While higher social expenditures increase government debts, the shocks from government debts to social expenditures are conversely uncertain. We discover that higher government debt does reduce social expenditures, but it may be linked to higher social spending. The robustness of partial coherency and phase-difference discovers the role of a political party in the decision over social welfare programmes in the sample countries.     

Asymmetric government expenditure: a comparison of advanced and developing countries

This paper studies the responsiveness of government expenditures to business cycles and introduces an index of asymmetric government expenditures using panel data for advanced and developing countries during the period 1981–2014. The empirical findings show that government expenditures tend to be procyclical in developing countries but acyclical in advanced economies. In addition, it is found that government expenditures respond in a countercyclical manner during bad times in advanced countries, but in a strongly procyclical manner during good times in developing countries. The index of asymmetric government expenditures for developing countries tends to be higher than that of the advanced countries.     

“Do Fiscal Deficits Influence Current Accounts? A Case Study of India”

This paper examines the effects of fiscal deficits on the current account deficits in the Indian economy. In many developing countries, fiscal deficits are mostly financed through monetization, causing crowding out of private investment expenditures. However, fiscal deficits in India are mostly financed through official borrowings from various external sources, leading to higher interest payments and outgoings on the external account. Such a policy could eventually precipitate balance of payments crises despite favorable trade account and real exchange rate. Data over three decades for the Indian economy show that, in addition to the real exchange rate and the ratio of private investment to GDP, fiscal deficits significantly contribute to the current account deficits.     

Fiscal Illusion and Cyclical Government Expenditure: State Government Expenditure in the United States

A well‐established literature argues that fiscal illusion increases the level of government expenditure. This article focuses on the proposition that fiscal illusion also influences the cyclicality of government expenditure. Predictions are formed with reference to government reliance on high income elasticities of indirect tax revenues and on intergovernmental transfers. Predictions are tested with reference to the expenditures of 36 states in the United States from 1980 to 2000. Government expenditures are more likely to be procyclical when citizens systematically underestimate the cost of taxation.     

Tax Expenditures on Health in Australia: 1960–61 to 1988–89

Commonwealth government tax expenditures arise because departures from the tax structure produce favourable tax treatment of particular types of activities or taxpayers. Such tax concessions can be used in the same way as direct expenditures to give effect to government policies, and in fact are often used as substitutes for direct expenditures. Although estimates of tax expenditures on health in more recent times are readily available, this form of subsidisation of the health sector has not been used heavily since the introduction of Medicare in 1984. It is for the period spanning the 1960s and the 1970s, when tax expenditures were a much more important source of health care finance, that consistent estimates are lacking. This article presents estimates of the revenue cost of income tax concessions for health in Australia over the period 1960–61 to 1988–89 and integrates these estimates into the currently available health expenditure statistics. It is concluded that failure to allow for tax expenditures on health when analysing public expenditures on health in Australia can lead to misleading conclusions about the net fiscal impact of changes in the Commonwealth's health expenditure policy. In particular, the fiscal effect of introducing Medihank in 1975 is significantly lower if account is taken of changes to tax concessions on health occurring at the same time. Likewise, the net cost of the introduction of Medicare in 1984 is overstated by measures based on direct outlays alone.     

Structural factors associated with primary fiscal balances in developing countries

The study explores the conditions under which a government in a developing country is likely to run a balanced or surplus budget. We contend that primary fiscal deficits are likely to persist where the economy is too saving constrained to raise private sector investment. To conduct the investigation, a logit model is applied to a sample of developing countries to see whether the saving constraints are associated with the fiscal stance of governments. Accordingly, income level, growth, external current account balance and foreign direct investment are used as indicators of the saving constraint. With the exception of economic growth, positive developments in these variables turned out to be significant to the likelihood of the government adopting a surplus budget.     

Decentralisation and income inequality in Central and Eastern European countries

This paper provides empirical evidence for the association between fiscal decentralisation and income distribution for a panel of 11 economies from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during 1992–2016. We focus on three research topics: the effect of decentralisation on income inequality; the effects of the structure of subnational government finance on income inequality; and the validity of the Kuznets hypothesis. The main findings from the empirical exercise are as follows: first, we provide firm evidence on the presumed favourable effects of fiscal decentralisation on income distribution in the CEE countries; second, our empirical model suggests that the effects of fiscal decentralisation on income inequality are dependent on the source of finance of subnational governments, i.e. intergovernmental transfers may have a role in income equalisation; third, we cannot confirm the validity of the Kuznets hypothesis in CEE countries.     

地区差距、要素流动与财政分权

本文在财政分权框架下引入不完全人口流动和内生劳动供给选择 ,针对两个不对称的地方经济 ,研究了政府的最优税收、最优公共支出和最优转移支付政策。我们发现了零中央政府收入税和逆向财政缺口 ,在有限政策工具的约束下 ,对应性转移支付也具有缩小区域差距的功能。不同级别政府间的服务竞争和税收竞争极大地影响了个人和政府的最优决策 ,拥挤效应和实际禀赋效应放大了通常意义上的收入效应水平。人口流动和财政分权提高了低生产力地区的福利 ,数值模拟分析结果表明高生产力、高禀赋地区对低生产力、低禀赋地区存在隐性的区域间收入再分配 ,中央政府的干预措施一般具有协调区域发展、补贴低生产力低禀赋地区的性质。结合我国东西部的经济现实 ,我们认为中央政府应该打破已有的利益分配格局 ,优化转移支付资金的结构 ,提高财政政策效率     

Combining Household Income and Expenditure Data in Policy Simulations

The analysis of the distributional impact of fiscal policy proposals often requires information on household expenditures and incomes. It is unusual to have one data source with information on both and this problem is generally overcome with statistical matching of independent data sources. In this paper Grade Correspondence Analysis (GCA) is investigated as a tool to improve the matching process. GCA draws out the relationships between the common variables to enable the sample to be partitioned into more homogeneous groups, prior to matching. An evaluation is conducted using the UK Family Expenditure Survey, which is unusual in containing both income and expenditure at a detailed level of disaggregation. Imputed expenditures are compared with actual expenditures through the use of indirect tax simulations. The most successful methods are then employed to enhance data from the Family Resources Survey and the synthetic dataset is used as a microsimulation model database.     

Fiscal limits in developing countries: A DSGE Approach

This paper studies fiscal limits in developing countries using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) approach. Distributions of fiscal limits, which measure a government’s capacity to service its debt, are simulated based on macroeconomic uncertainty and fiscal policy. The analysis shows that expected future revenue plays an important role in explaining the low fiscal limits of developing countries, relative to those of developed countries. Large devaluation of real exchange rates can significantly reduce a government’s capacity to service its debt and lower the fiscal limits. Temporary disturbances, therefore, can shift the distribution of fiscal limits and suddenly change perceptions about fiscal sustainability.     

Fiscal Consolidations: A Theoretical Essay with a Heterogeneous-Agent Model

Since the emergence of the financial crisis, most of the EU countries have promoted impressive public interventions to support financial institutions, contributing to a significant rise in general government gross debt-to-GDP ratios. As such, the issue of how to best pursue a fiscal consolidation will become crucial regarding the fiscal policy stance. This paper aims at characterizing four different stylized debt consolidation strategies extensively identified in the literature (one pure revenue-based and three expenditure-based) in order to assess welfare affects and, in particular, the inequality effects involved. For this purpose, we built a general equilibrium heterogeneous-agent model capable of exploring the relationship between fiscal policy and the endogenous cross-section distribution of income and wealth. Moreover, we decompose the impacts on welfare criteria in order to distinguish pure efficiency effects from insurance and inequality effects. According to our simulations, the adjustment based on the reduction of unproductive expenditures came out to be the most welfare-enhancing compared to those based on tax increases or on social transfer reductions.     

THE IMPACT OF TERRORISM AND CONFLICTS ON GROWTH IN ASIA

This paper quantifies the impact of terrorism and conflicts on income per capita growth in Asia for 1970–2004. Our panel estimations show that transnational terrorist attacks had a significant growth-limiting effect. An additional terrorist incident per million persons reduces gross domestic product per capita growth by about 1.5%. In populous countries, many additional attacks are needed to achieve such a large impact. Transnational terrorism reduces growth by crowding-in government expenditures. Unlike developing countries, developed countries are able to absorb terrorism without displaying adverse economic consequences. An internal conflict has the greatest growth concern, more than twice that of transnational terrorism. Conflict variables are associated with smaller investment shares and increased government spending, with the crowding-in of government spending being the dominant influence.     

Global capital markets,direct taxation and the redistribution of income

Standard fiscal theory suggests that taxation should be heaviest on the least mobile factors of production – for both efficiency and revenue reasons. A shift in tax burdens from capital to labour as economies become globally integrated is thus justified. This theoretical tradition (founded by Ramsay and continued by Mirrlees and Lucas) assumes by construction that profit taxes reduce investment and growth; and while sensitive to inter-generational equity, sidesteps the issue of income distribution within generations. In contrast, starting from Keynes’ critique of these assumptions and building on modern endogenous growth models, it can be shown that profit taxation is not necessarily injurious to productive investment. In practice, moreover, the effect of globalisation has not been to reduce tax rates on capital, but rather to erode the tax base itself (i.e. ‘tax evasion’). Improved information exchange between tax authorities, which is now being driven by fiscal insolvency in developed countries, would allow tax incidence to be shifted so as to improve income distribution within OECD countries. Such cooperation could also permit the replacement of the current discretionary system of fiscal transfers from rich to poor countries (‘development aid’) by equitable sharing of global capital tax revenue.     

PRODUCTIVE GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE IN MONETARY BUSINESS CYCLE MODELS

This paper assesses the transmission of fiscal policy shocks in a New Keynesian framework where government expenditures contribute to aggregate production. It is shown that even if the impact of government expenditures on production is small, this assumption helps to reconcile the models' predictions about fiscal policy effects with recent empirical evidence. In particular, it is shown that government expenditures can lead to a rise in private consumption, real wages, and employment if the government share is not too large and public finance does not solely rely on distortionary taxation. When government expenditures are partially financed by public debt, unit labor costs fall in response to a fiscal expansion, such that inflation tends to decline. Households are willing to raise consumption if monetary policy is active, i.e. ensures that the real interest rate rises with inflation. Otherwise, private consumption can also be crowded out, as in the conventional case where government expenditures are not productive.     

Government size,composition of public spending and economic growth in Brazil

The performance of the fiscal policy is largely affected by the relationship between government size, composition of public spending and economic growth. We use a theoretical framework to find optimal relations among these variables and confront them with a panel data for the Brazilian states. Private capital and government spending are substitute inputs in production as the Brazilian states require provision of public spending to fill gaps in the underdeveloped private sector. Public investment and current government expenditures are combined in fixed ratios in the overall government spending due to strong rigidity of the public budget. The optimal share of public investment is considerably lower than current expenditures, as occurs in developing countries characterized by low economic dynamism. Finally, the average tax burden from the data is below the estimated optimal level, meaning that there is space for increasing tax rate without harming economic growth for some Brazilian states.     

影响我国地方政府财政支出效率的因素研究*——基于财政、晋升和发展压力的视角#br#

提高地方政府财政支出效率是实现财政可持续发展的重要条件。本文使用2004—2016年我国30个省份的数据,基于DEA模型和Malmquist指数测算了我国地方政府的财政支出效率,并分析了财政压力、晋升压力和发展压力对地方政府财政支出效率的影响。结果表明：（1）各地区财政支出技术效率变动指数均值和规模效率均值变化差异不大;（2）财政压力越大,地方政府财政支出效率越低;（3）经济增长率越高,地方政府财政支出效率越低;（4）地方政府超额完成中央的经济发展目标有利于改善当地财政支出效率。