Imbalances over the Pacific

This paper examines various theories of current account (trade) imbalances between the U.S. and China, by estimating a structural VAR model with long-run zero restrictions. The factors that we examine include: productivity differential, fiscal policy, consumption/saving choice, and real and nominal demand side factors comprising monetary policy, and reserve accumulation. On average, technology shocks are found to play a dominant role in explaining the trade balance movement between China and the U.S. However, in the particular period of 2004–07 when global imbalances peaked, we find that demand shocks played an unusually large role. This contrast between the average tendency and the rather abnormal development in the mid-2000s provides general equilibrium evidence for several theories of current account (trade) balance imbalance. But it also shows that the experience of the mid-2000s does not have to repeat itself, given that it was an atypical development different from the average tendency.     

Fiscal policy and the current account: are microstates different?

This article examines the empirical link between fiscal policy and the current account focusing on microstates defined as countries with a population of less than 2 million between 1970 and 2009. This article employs panel regression and Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) on 155 countries of which 42 are microstates. Panel regression results show that a percentage point improvement in the fiscal balance improves the current account balance by 0.4 percentage points of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The real effective exchange rate has no significant impact on the current account in microstates but the coefficient is significant in the global sample. PVAR results show that an increase in government consumption results in real exchange appreciation, but the effect on the current account after an initial deterioration dies out quicker in microstates than in the global sample. The result implies that fiscal policy has little effect on the current account in microstates beyond its direct impact on imports. Overall, the results suggest that the weak relative price effects make the effect of fiscal adjustment on the current account much more difficult in microstates.     

Structural and Cyclical Factors behind Current Account Balances

Global external imbalances widened persistently over the last several years and have narrowed abruptly over the course of the financial crisis. Understanding the extent to which structural or cyclical factors may have driven these patterns is important to assess the likely evolution of global imbalances going forward, as well as the potential adjustment that can be achieved through changes in policy. This paper assesses the link between structural and cyclical factors and current account balances using a panel of 94 countries from 1973 to 2008. We find that the medium‐term evolution of global external imbalances can be related in large part to structural factors including cross‐country differences in demographics, fiscal deficits, oil dependency and intensity, stage of economic development, financial market development, and institutional quality. Part of the narrowing in current account balances since the financial crisis appears to be related to various cyclical factors including changes in output growth, oil prices, and exchange rates, and may be expected to reverse alongside the economic recovery.     

Twin deficits and fiscal spillovers in the EMU's periphery. A Keynesian perspective

The objective of this paper is to shed light on the twin deficit hypothesis in Southern Europe and the MENA region, taking into account fiscal spillovers from the core during the global crisis. Using Godley and Lavoie (2007)'s baseline model, we first show that fiscal shocks from a core region could aggravate macroeconomic imbalances in the periphery. We then gather data from the period 1977–2016 for ten MENA and peripheral EMU countries, and model the twin deficit hypothesis in the presence of fiscal spillover with a P-VARX methodology. Our results highlight that fiscal balance, current account, and GDP growth rates in the EMU's periphery are negatively affected by fiscal consolidations in the core. Fiscal discipline in surplus countries is tantamount to a ‘beggar thy neighbor’ effect on the periphery, in times of crisis. We discuss the implications of our results to propose further international coordination of macroeconomic policies.     

Deficit reduction: Short-term pain for long-term gain

The paper evaluates the costs and benefits of fiscal consolidation using simulations based on the IMFs global dynamic general equilibrium model GIMF. Over the longer run, well-targeted permanent reductions in budget deficits can lead to a considerable increase in both the growth rate and the level of output. The gains may be enhanced by shifting some of the tax burden from incomes to consumption. In the short-run, credibility plays a crucial role in determining the size of initial output losses. Global current account imbalances would be significantly reduced if budget consolidation was larger in countries with current account deficits.     

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.     

Comparative analyses of fiscal sustainability of the budgetary policy rules

We construct a continuous-time overlapping generations model with an endogenous growth structure and consider fiscal sustainability under two fiscal rules: (i) the government fixes the budget deficit-to-GDP ratio and (ii) the government fixes the primary balance-to-GDP ratio. Under the constant budget deficit-to-GDP rule, fiscal sustainability is ensured when the initial public debt-to-GDP and budget deficit-to-GDP ratios are sufficiently small. Under the constant primary balance-to-GDP rule, it is difficult to ensure fiscal sustainability when the primary balance is in deficit or zero. However, fiscal sustainability is ensured when the primary balance is in surplus and the initial government debt-to-GDP ratio is sufficiently small.     

FROM BUDGETARY FORECASTS TO EX POST FISCAL DATA: EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION OF FISCAL FORECAST ERRORS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

This paper splits the ex post error in the budget balance, defined as the final budget figure minus the planned figure, into implementation and revision errors, and investigates the determinants of these errors. The implementation error is the difference between the nowcast, published toward the end of the year of budget implementation, and the planned budget, while the revision error is the difference between the final figure and the nowcast. The split takes account of differences in reporting incentives at the different budgeting stages. The predictive content of fiscal plans is important, because it determines the reliability of the budget, while that of the nowcasts is important also because these figures are an input for the next budget and may contain important signals about the fiscal stance. Implementation and revision errors may arise for political and strategic reasons. Our results suggest that an improvement in the quality of institutions, whether measured by the tightness of national fiscal rules, the medium‐term budgetary framework or budgetary transparency, increases the quality of budgetary reporting at both the planning and the nowcast stage. This supports the recently adopted requirements on national fiscal frameworks. It also strengthens the case for a close monitoring by the European Commission of national budgeting. (JEL E6, H6)     

The dynamics of municipal fiscal adjustment

The dynamic fiscal policy adjustment of local jurisdictions is investigated empirically using a panel of more than 1000 U.S. municipalities over a quarter of a century. Distinguishing own-source revenue, grants, expenditures, and debt service, the analysis is carried out using a vector error-correction model which takes account of the intertemporal budget constraint. The results indicate that a large part of the adjustment in response to fiscal imbalances takes place by offsetting changes in future expenditures. In addition, the results show that fiscal imbalances are financed to a significant extent by subsequent changes in grants. Decomposition of the sample according to average city population reveals that the basic pattern of fiscal adjustment is robust, although intergovernmental grants play a much more pronounced role in maintaining budget balance for large cities.     

Is fiscal policy stationary in China? A regional study by local government

In this study, we apply a stationarity test with a flexible Fourier function proposed by Enders and Lee (2012) to test the stationarity of the deficit–GDP ratio in China. We find that our approximation has a higher power to detect U-shaped breaks and to smooth breaks than the linear method if the true data-generating process of the deficit–GDP ratio convergence is, in fact, a stationary non-linear process. The results show that the stationarity for fiscal policy varies across different regions and that the deficit–GDP ratio of half of the regions is stationary. The results related to the budget structural balance and the fiscal deficit indicate no expansion in the Eastern and Central regions. We find that China's provinces in these two regions meet the stability theory of fiscal policy in the current stage of development. The deficit–GDP ratio is not stationary in the Western and Northeastern regions. These results indicate that the fiscal deficits in these regions are expanding and cannot be controlled by automatic market adjustment, and the government should therefore avoid deficit expansion in favor of a balanced budget policy.     

Fiscal stance,the current account and the real exchange rate: Some empirical estimates from a time-varying framework

This paper examines the time-varying time series processes of the interaction between government fiscal deficits, the current account balance and the real exchange rate for the U.K. and U.S. economies. This is achieved in a novel way by estimating a time-varying vector autoregression model that allows for time variation in the stochastic variance and autoregressive parameters. This paper finds that, contrary to results reported in the recent literature, government deficit shocks worsen the U.S. current account balance. In contrast, results based on the historical time series for the U.K. show evidence of fiscal deficits having actually improved the current account balance. However, in commonality, the time-varying estimates show that the impact of fiscal deficits on the U.K. and U.S. current account balance has fallen in magnitude over the past 20 years. The time-varying variance decomposition results illustrate that fiscal deficit shocks played a key role in driving U.K. current account and real exchange rate fluctuations throughout the 1980s. In contrast, fiscal deficit shocks have been a small factor in the variation of U.S. current account and exchange rate fluctuations over the past 25 years. The time-varying results in this paper do not support the view that future fiscal deficit reductions alone can eliminate U.K. and U.S. current account imbalances.     

The contribution of equalization transfers to fiscal adjustment: Empirical results for German municipalities and a US–German comparison

This paper considers the role of fiscal equalization in maintaining fiscal balance. It employs a large panel of German municipalities in order to investigate the dynamic fiscal policy adjustment using a vector-error–correction model that explicitly takes account of the intertemporal budget constraint. The results confirm that a substantial part of fiscal adjustment to revenue shocks takes place by offsetting changes in intergovernmental transfers: in present-value terms about 34 cents of a permanent 1 € decrease in own revenues are compensated by subsequent changes in fiscal-equalization transfers. Hence, the contribution of intergovernmental transfers in maintaining fiscal balance is found to be two to three times larger than in the case of US municipalities investigated by Buettner and Wildasin [Buettner, T., Wildasin, D.E., 2006. The dynamics of municipal fiscal adjustment. Journal of Public Economics 90, 1115–1132]. Despite fiscal equalization, however, expenditures are not found to display smaller fluctuations in the German case.     

Real-time uncertainty in budget planning: evidence from euro area countries1

Using rich panel data including potential output for euro area countries, we analyse budget balance forecasts and their errors. We find that budget balance forecasts are systematically biased and subject to mean reversion (tendency towards more balanced budgets). A robust result is that errors in budget balance nowcasts contribute to errors in budget balance forecasts. In addition, we find that nowcasted macroeconomic conditions can affect over-optimism in budget balance forecasts. Overall, our results emphasize the central role of nowcasting in the EU fiscal framework.     

The impact of financial regulation on current account balances

Both global imbalances and financial market deregulation feature prominently among the potential causes of the global financial crisis, but they have been largely discussed separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market regulation and current account balances, an area for which limited empirical evidence exists. We use a panel of countries over the period 1980–2010 and employ a novel empirical approach which allows us to simultaneously account for model uncertainty, current account persistence and unobserved heterogeneity. We find robust evidence that financial market regulations affect current account balances and that different aspects of these regulations can have opposing effects on the current account. In particular we find that easing bank entry barriers is negatively associated with the current account balance. In contrast, bank privatization and securities market deregulation tend to raise current account balances. Our results also highlight the importance to control for persistence and unobserved heterogeneity. Once we control for these factors, we find robust evidence for a wide range of current account theories in contrast to previous studies accounting for model uncertainty.     

养老保险个人账户调整对我国财政体系代际平衡状况的影响

养老保险体系对财政政策的代际平衡状况有重要影响,我国养老保险个人账户规模缩小至8%可以使代际不平衡状况下降10个百分点,而降低养老基金保值率对改善代际不平衡状况的作用有限。因此我们在缩小个人账户规模后,应该考虑尽快将个人账户“做实”,通过提高养老基金保值率来激励单位和个人参加养老保险。     

Fiscal Balance and Current Account in Professional Forecasts

This paper investigates the relationship between financial institutions' expectations of the current account and the fiscal balance. Using professional macroeconomic forecasts for the G‐7 countries, we find a positive relationship between forecasts of the cyclically adjusted fiscal balance deficit and forecasts of the current account deficit, indicating that professional forecasts embody links implied by the twin deficits hypothesis. In assessing the relationship between the forecasts of the fiscal deficit and the current account, we find that forecasters correctly make the distinction between the effect of fiscal policy and automatic stabilizers.     

Official fiscal forecasts in EU member states under the European Semester and Fiscal Compact – An empirical assessment

The efficacy of official forecasts in the EU has been under the spotlight since the introduction of the euro, with biases widely reported prior to the 2008–12 financial and sovereign bond market crisis. Changes to the EU fiscal rules and procedures, in the form of the European Semester and Fiscal Compact, in the early 2010s were adopted to improve forecasting, including through providing a role for independent fiscal institutions. Using data for 22 countries between 2013 and 2019, this paper shows that, despite these changes, biases, of a pessimistic form, remain in forecasts of budget balance and output variables in Stability and Convergence Programmes and the European Commission's Spring Forecasts. Econometric analysis indicates forecast errors in both the headline budget balance and the structural budget balance being explained by forecast errors in output variables and by EU fiscal rule requirements. Member states under an excessive deficit procedure provide optimistic headline budget balance forecasts compared to non-EDP countries, while those that have not met their medium-term objective report smaller forecast errors for the structural budget balance. Independent fiscal institutions are linked to a smaller bias to forecasts of the structural budget balance but have no effect on the forecast errors of the headline budget balance.     

Asset prices, exchange rates and the current account

This paper analyses the role of asset prices in comparison to other factors, in particular exchange rates, as a driver of the US trade balance. It employs a Bayesian structural VAR model that requires imposing only a minimum of economically meaningful sign restrictions. We find that equity market shocks and housing price shocks have been major determinants of the US current account in the past, accounting for up to 30% of the movements of the US trade balance at a horizon of 20 quarters. By contrast, shocks to the real exchange rate have been less relevant, explaining about 9% and exerting a more temporary effect on the US trade balance. Our findings suggest that large exchange rate movements may not necessarily be the key element of an adjustment of today's large current account imbalances, and that in particular relative global asset price changes could be a potent source of adjustment.     

财政支出分权如何影响政府支出预算偏离*

政府支出决算与预算的差异可称之为支出预算偏离，其大小直接关系到现代预算制度的建设和积极财政政策提质增效的效果。预算最大化理论指出地方政府追求自由裁量预算的最大化，这会导致预算支出大于决算支出，而财政支出分权则便利了地方政府追求自由裁量预算最大化的条件，因此，财政支出分权是导致支出预算偏离的一个重要因素。利用1994—2017年全省层面和市县加总层面的财政预决算数据，本文发现，财政支出分权程度越高，政府支出预算偏离的程度也越大。不同形式的稳健性检验较好地支持了上述结论。此外，经济发展水平和财政透明度能够降低财政支出分权对预算偏离影响的程度。合理调整不同层级政府之间的事权，建立事权与支出责任相匹配的财政体制，适度加强中央事权和支出责任，将有效降低政府支出预算偏离的程度。