Visibility estimates of budgetary burden and benefit in European countries

Intermediate territorial levels of government in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain are different regarding their basic institutions, devolved powers, revenue and public expenditure systems, public revenue equalization mechanisms, accountability, public performance management, and financial control bodies. In spite of the complexity derived from these different characteristics, this paper presents some indicators which permit the creation of time and space fiscal visibility measurements and comparisons. It also advances systematic estimates on visibility for intermediate subsystems of public revenue and expenditure now in force in these European countries. Policy implications seem straightforward. That is, current values are low in general, and allocation improvements could be obtained by implementing changes and reforms that aim to raise both public revenue and expenditure visibility.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999. The author is indebted to the participants of this conference and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. The author is responsible for any errors or shortcomings.     

Fiscal visibility in the european union member countries: New estimates

Improvements in the efficient allocation of resources can be reached by increasing public revenue and expenditure visibility. This paper presents some indicators permitting the making of time and space fiscal visibility measurements and comparisons and advances new systematic estimates on fiscal visibility for systems and subsystems of public revenue now in force in the European Union member countries. Policy implications seem straightforward for these countries as present revenue visibility values are low in general. Allocation improvements could be obtained by implementing changes and reforms aiming to raise values of public revenue visibility and to make domestic fiscal systems and subsystems converge to the highest values.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 43rd International Atlantic Economic Conference, London, March 11–18, 1997. I am indebted to the late Giovanni Caravale. Jose Ferraz-Nunes, Bernard Malamud, and other participants of this conference for helpful comments. The responsibility for any errors and shortcomings is mine.     

Arithmetic visibility estimates for OECD countries with three government levels

The importance of fiscal visibility has been well known for a long time but attempts to quantify it by taking the internal structure of every type of revenue and expenditure in a fiscal system into consideration are recent. Indicators used until now rest on structural parameters combined in a multiplicative way with a 0 estimate always resulting in at least one of such factors being null. An alternative way to measure fiscal visibility consists of combining parametric values in an additive instead of a multiplicative form. Calculations can then show estimates which are much more sensitive to the initial values. The aim of this contribution is to present new additive indicators that are applied to several territorial government levels in Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the U. S. Comparisons, conclusions, and comments are offered for general development. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 55th International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 12–16, 2003. The author is indebted to participants of this conference for helpful comments. The responsibility for any errors or shortcomings are the author's.     

The effects of public deficits on money growth in the European Union

The impact of government debt on the money supply has been studied for different countries, with an emphasis on developing countries and the U.S. This topic becomes especially interesting in European Union countries that have high public deficits and low inflation rates. It is also very relevant in the monetary union, with a European central bank controlling monetary policy and introducing monetary measures for all the member countries. The main goal of this paper is to analyze if there is any relationship between public deficits and monetary growth in the European Union. The conclusions presented in the previous literature are ambiguous. Some studies concluded that there is little evidence that government debt influences money in some of the member countries.     

The political economy of IMF conditionality and central bank independence

International organizations (IOs) often drive policy change in member countries. Given IOs' limited political leverage over a member country, previous research argues that IOs rely on a combination of hard pressures (i.e., conditionality) and soft pressures (i.e., socialization) to attain their political goals. Expanding this literature, we hypothesize that IOs can enhance their political leverage through loan conditions aimed at enhancing the political independence of key administrative units. Studying this mechanism in the context of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), we argue that through prescribing structural loan conditions on central banks (CBI conditionality), the IMF empowers central banks to gain more political leverage with the aim to limit a government's ability to (ab)use monetary policy for political gain. Divorcing monetary authorities from their respective government, the IMF intends to alter political dynamics towards achieving greater program compliance and enhance long-term macro-financial stability. Relying on a dataset including up to 124 countries between 1980 and 2012, we find that the IMF deploys CBI conditionality to countries with fewer checks and balances, a less independent central bank, and where the government relies more heavily on the monetization of public debt.     

Fiscal harmonization in the European Union with public inputs

Fiscal harmonization among the European Union member states is a goal involving major difficulties for its implementation. Each country faces a particular trade-off between fiscal revenues generated by taxation and the productive efficiency loss induced by their respective tax code. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of these trade-offs for a number of the European Union (EU-15) member states using a dynamic general equilibrium model with public inputs. Calibration of the model for the EU-15 member states provides the following results: i) the maximum tax revenue level is relatively far from the current tax levels for most countries; ii) the cases of Sweden, Denmark and Finland are anomalous, as productive efficiency can be gained by lowering tax rates without affecting fiscal revenues; iii) in general, countries would obtain efficiency gains without changing fiscal revenues by reducing the capital tax and increasing the labor tax; and iv) capital tax harmonization to the average capital tax rate can be done with quite small changes in both fiscal revenues and output for most countries.     

Public goods, merit goods, and the relation between private and government consumption

In this paper, we investigate the relation between public and private consumption, by constructing a general government spending data set, by function, for 12 European countries. In particular, we split government consumption into two categories. The first category—“public goods”—includes defence, public order, and justice. The second category—“merit goods”—includes health, education, and other services that could have been provided privately. Equations from a relatively general permanent income model are estimated by GMM. The estimates are fairly robust in showing that public goods substitute while merit goods complement private consumption. However, the relation between merit goods and private goods turns out to be stronger than that between public goods and private goods. Thus, in the aggregate government and private consumption are complements.     

Equilibrium real interest rates and the financial cycle: Empirical evidence for Euro area member countries

We estimate the equilibrium real interest rate for nine Euro area member countries and the Euro area as a whole using quarterly data from 1995 to 2015. We expand the standard model of estimating real equilibrium interest rates to incorporate the financial cycle for the private sector. We show that adding the financial cycle indeed alters the equilibrium real interest rate estimates and, in line with previous studies, that there is a fall in the equilibrium real interest rate over time. Our results indicate that in most member countries the real rate is lower than its equilibrium level. Hence, they should not worry about secular stagnation now. This is because secular stagnation is likely to occur when real interest rates are higher than their equilibrium levels. This result can serve as a starting point for further research in this field, e.g. by adding public sector financial cycles or disentangling the roles of households, corporations and the government.     

Inflation and growth: Explaining a negative effect

The paper presents a monetary model of endogenous growth and specifies an econometric model consistent with it. The economic model suggests a negative inflation-growth effect, and one that is stronger at lower levels of inflation. Empirical evaluation of the model is based on a large panel of OECD and APEC member countries over the years 1961–1997. The hypothesized negative inflation effect is found comprehensively for the OECD countries to be significant and, as in the theory, to increase marginally as the inflation rate falls. For APEC countries, the results from using instrumental variables also show significant evidence of a similar behavior. The nature of the inflation-growth profile and differences in this between the regions are interpreted with the credit production technology of the model in a way not possible with a standard cash-only economy. Research assistance by László Konya, Rezida Zakirova, and Anton Nakov and comments by Michal Kejak, Myles Wallace and Toni Braun are kindly acknowledged, along with comments from the 17^th European Economic Association Meetings, Venice, and the 10^th International Panel Data Conference, Berlin. We also thank the editors and referees for valuable comments, and the first author is grateful to Central European University for research funds.     

Democracy,visibility and public good provision

We examine the role of visibility in influencing government resource allocation across a multiplicity of public goods. We show that a “visibility effect” distorts governmental resource allocation such that it helps explain why governments neglect provision of essential public goods, despite their considerable benefits. We show that greater democratization widens the gap in resource allocation between more visible (such as famine prevention) versus less visible (such as malnutrition prevention) public goods, up to an intermediate level of democracy. Beyond this level, this gap decreases. Furthermore, public goods with low visibility are prone to multiple equilibria in resource allocation, with voter expectations being shown to be important.     

Secession Clauses: A Tool for the Taming of an Arising Leviathan in Brussels?

Several scholars have recently come out in support of the argument by James Buchanan that each member state of the European Union be given the right to secede from the EU. According to these scholars, a simple majority ought to be sufficient for secession, since this would help check the tendency of EU institutions to increase their power against the will of both member states and individuals. This paper, however, argues that while secession may be a means to increase individual liberty vis-a-vis a central government, it may also be abused by a majority in order to oppress the minority of the respective jurisdiction's inhabitants. Since in a federation different government levels check each others' power, thereby enhancing individual freedom, secession removes one of these governmental levels and, hence, distorts the existing system of checks and balances. This paper argues that such a drastic step has the character of a constitutional act and thus should be decided on under rules reserved for post constitutional legislation.     

A human well-being approach for assessing the value of natural land areas

To decide on the policy measures to be implemented, policymakers need comprehensive information on the costs and benefits of land conversion for society. Accordingly, the EU Biodiversity Strategy requires the member countries to assess their ecosystems and the economic value of their ecosystem services by 2020. This paper takes up and extends the subjective well-being approach to valuing changes in natural land cover, which provides information on willingness-to-pay for landscape amenities such as scenic views or recreational opportunities. Results at the NUTS 2 level for European countries indicate (a) that marginal willingness-to-pay estimates tend to be higher for natural areas that are scarcer, and (b) that a nonlinear relationship between land cover and well-being is preferred to a linear relationship indicating decreasing benefits from individual landscape amenities.     

世界多国政府对处方药物定价和报销规定的法律问题研究

处方药的价格对世界各国的医疗体系都至关重要,笔者研究了9个国家公共医疗体系对处方药定价和报销政策的规定,包括欧盟四个成员国法国、德国、意大利和英国,还有澳大利亚、巴西、印度、日本和韩国,总结出这些国家对处方药定价和报销政策规定中普遍存在的法律问题,并提出立法建议。     

Heterogeneity in preferences for redistribution and public spending: A cross-country analysis

Political coordination and policy outcomes may be the result not only of the position of the ‘median voter’ in a political scale but also of the heterogeneity of preferences around the median. Depending on the level of government and the type of policy, such heterogeneity may lead to lower public spending and redistribution. We assess this issue empirically by analyzing the relationship between the distribution of preferences for redistribution and the amount of public expenditure at different levels of government and for several types of spending in 23 European countries. Our results suggest a negative and significant correlation between heterogeneity of preferences for redistribution and public spending that is stronger at the local level and for redistributive functions, independent of the median individual's preferences.     

欧债危机对中国的影响及国际货币体系的改革思考

近期,欧债危机愈演愈烈,已显现出向欧元区核心国家蔓延的态势。本文重点分析了欧债危机对中国的影响,在此基础上从短期和长期两个角度提出了中国面对欧债危机的应对之策。同时,作者分析了欧债危机对今后区域与国际货币体系改革的启示,并探讨了中国如何参与当前国际货币体系的改革。     

The taming of Leviathan: Competition among governments

This paper assesses the consequences of a high degree of international capital mobility for the behavior of governments. It is argued that countries can be seen as clubs where the government as club management acts as an entrepreneur attempting to attract internationally mobile resources. Within this stylized model it is shown that competition induces the government of a small democratic country to implement policy reforms that increase the welfare of domestic residents if it wants to be reelected. This result suggests that international openness may be a substitute for more overt attempts to contain a government's Leviathan tendencies such as constitutional amendments. Finally, the case against competition among governments is analyzed from the perspective of the club model developed in the paper. An earlier version of this paper appeared as Kiel Working Paper No. 458. The author would like to thank Hartmut Kliemt, Werner Pommerehne, Helmut Reisen, Pierre Salmon, Horst Siebert, Viktor Vanberg as well as seminar participants at the University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, the OECD Development Centre in Paris and at the 1991 meeting of the European Public Choice Society in Beaune for helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.     

Asymmetric effects of fiscal policy in EU and OECD countries

In this article, we take account of an evaluation of the short- and medium-term effects of the transmission mechanism of fiscal policy in EU and OECD countries and their dependence on the state of the economy and fiscal behaviour. Our findings indicate that (i) across EU member states the impact of government spending on economic performance is larger in the accession than in core member states, (ii) since the onset of the economic/financial crisis the government spending multipliers have become larger in both core and accession EU member states, and (iii) a comparison with fiscal responses in the OECD countries shows robustness of our estimates. The conclusion implies that the austerity measures present a substantial drag for economic activity in accession EU countries. Thus, we may state that not considering the fiscal behaviour and state of the economy gives misleading fiscal multiplier effects, which in turn lead to the adoption of inappropriate fiscal measures that even worsen a country's economic situation.     

Price Levels and Economic Growth: Making Sense of Revisions to Data on Real Incomes

The price surveys from the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) imply substantially lower levels of GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) for many developing countries than prior estimates. While some observers have questioned the data, this paper argues that the pattern of changes in PPPs between ICP rounds makes economic sense. Consistently with the original Balassa–Samuelson model, more rapidly growing economies experienced steeper increases in their PPPs relative to official exchange rates. This effect was even stronger for poor countries. Taking account of this effect would reduce the need for such large data revisions when new ICP data become available.     

HAS EUROPEAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AFFECTED THE FUNCTIONAL COMPOSITION OF GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES?

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge toward a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU member states engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through calculation of a constructed dissimilarity index and by adapting the usual indicators of convergence (β, σ, and γ), reveal that there has been a harmonization process. In addition, this approximation of the structures of government expenditures has been greater in the EU than in the non-EU countries of the OECD. Nevertheless, EU member states are converging toward a different steady-state composition of government expenditures. (JEL H11, H50, H60 )     

THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGY: PATENTS, R&D SPILLOVERS, AND THEIR EFFECTS ON PRODUCTIVITY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND UNITED STATES

Multilateral indices of total factor productivity (TFP) allow efficiency comparisons between ten European Union countries and the United States from 1973 to 1993. Differences in TFP levels are then explained by land quality differences, public research and development (R&D) expenditures, education levels, private-sector patents, international spillovers of public R&D, and private-sector technology transfer. There is evidence that public R&D results in limited knowledge spillovers between the European countries and the United States. However, the use of international patent data from the Yale Technology Concordance shows not only that patents matter, but also that private sector technology transfer may be the dominant force in explaining TFP trends. The United States and the European Union countries with more advanced research systems (Netherlands, Denmark, France, and Belgium) converge in a high-growth club, while Germany, Luxembourg, Greece, Italy, Ireland, and the United Kingdom form the slow-growth group. Ignoring knowledge spillovers and technology transfer leads to biased estimates of R&D elasticities, which is hardly surprising since the private sector is now spending more than the public in some of these countries. Thus, the estimated rate of return to public agricultural R&D falls from over 60% in the closed economy model to 10% in the model that takes account of international spillovers. (JEL Q16)