The impressive contribution of Canadian economists to fiscal federalism theory and policy

The study of fiscal federalism has been central to the research of Canadian economists since the Rowell–Sirois Report. To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Economics Association, it is fitting to take stock of their contributions. We focus on the period since 1982 and emphasize the main scholarly publications of an inclusive array of Canadian economists and economists in Canadian universities. Our attention is devoted to applications in the context of federal and provincial governments, setting aside related issues in municipal government finance. We briefly discuss instances where the fiscal federalism literature has informed policy debates including through policy research institutes, government commissions and international organizations.     

鼓励自主创新的财税政策研究

公共财政支持自主创新对于一国技术创新和经济发展具有重要意义。本文首先分析公共财政为什么要支持自主创新，其次在借鉴美国创新政策的基础上，提出支持自主创新的财税政策：财政支出政策、税收激励政策和相关配套政策。     

Contributions to Canadian economic history: The last 30 years

The cliometric revolution that transformed economic history in the US in the 1960s was soon embraced by Canadian economic historians. Many of the important issues surrounding Canadian development remained the same: the role of resources, the place of international trade, immigration, capital accumulation and interactions with Native Americans, among others. But beginning in the 1960s, and certainly over the last 30 years, economic historians of Canada have addressed them with the tools of modern economics, both theoretical and empirical. We highlight the recent work emphasizing not just the methods but also the fundamental ways our understanding of Canadian history has been changed.     

The Role of Keynesian Policies in Semi-industrialized Countries: theory and evidence from India

This paper examines the relevance of Keynesian policies—interpreted as those policies implied by Keynes's theoretical analysis of unemployment developed in The General Theory—for a subset of developing economies, which are called semi-industrialized countries. It draws on recent contributions in development economics to argue on theoretical grounds that Keynesian policies are relevant for semi-industrialized countries even when they are constrained by capital shortages, stagnant agricultural sectors, and foreign exchange availability. It then discusses the recent development experience of India to illustrate the empirical relevance of some of these theoretical issues.     

Environmental and resource economics: A Canadian retrospective

The paper reviews research contributions to environmental and resource economics by scholars in Canada. We focus mainly on work from the past 25 years but also highlight earlier pathbreaking work. We begin by looking at broad trends in research both internationally and within Canada. We then review Canadian contributions to various topics in the field. Canadians have played a leading role in the development of the field, especially in resource economics, international environmental economics and the valuation of environmental amenities.     

Applying behavioural economics to public policy in Canada

Behavioural economics incorporates ideas from psychology, sociology and neuroscience to better predict how individuals make long‐term decisions. Often the ideas adopted include present or inattention bias, both potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes. But these models also point to opportunities for effective, low‐cost government policies that can have meaningful positive effects on people's long‐term well‐being. The last decade has been marked by a growing interest from governments the world over in using behavioural economics to inform policy decisions. This is true of Canada as well. In this paper we discuss the increasingly important role behavioural economics plays in Canadian public policy. We first contextualize government policies that have incorporated insights from behavioural economics by outlining a collection of models of intertemporal choice. We then present examples of public policy initiatives that are based upon findings in the field, placing particular emphasis on Canadian initiatives. We also document future opportunities, challenges and limitations.     

推动中国农村金融发展的财政政策梳理与评价

农村经济自身特点、国家产业政策和金融政策对农村金融发展的影响在相当程度上与财政政策有关,因为农村经济特点是客观存在的,在市场经济条件下这些问题的解决需要通过财政分配来缓解;而国家产业政策与金融政策是以全局需要为出发点,其对农村金融发展带来的不利影响往往也需要通过财政政策的运用来缓解,因此认真分析研究影响农村金融发展的财政政策制度因素,梳理、评价现行的促进农村金融发展的财政政策体系就显得尤为重要。     

Public Versus Private Provision of Public Goods

It is well known that public goods are underprovided in a static setting with voluntary contributions. Public provision—in a median voter framework with proportional taxation—generally exceeds private provision. This paper compares private and public provision of public goods in a dynamic setting. In a dynamic setting, voluntary donations can result in efficient provision. Also, majority‐rule solutions exist even when taxes are not proportional to income. At low discount factors, public provision tends to exceed private provision. As patience increases, however, private provision may exceed public provision. This occurs because many outcomes with a low level of public good provision—and potentially large targeted transfer payments to particular individuals—become sustainable under public provision. Under private provision, however, large targeted transfers are unsustainable. To finance the public good, private provision tends to result in benefit taxation, and public provision tends to result in progressive taxation.     

Taxation of International Private Capital Flows and Securities Transactions in Developing Countries: Do Public Finance Considerations Augment the Macroeconomic Dividends?

This paper examines policies to tax international private capital flows and securities transactions in developing countries. Many recent studies focus on the macroeconomic dividends associated with these policies (namely, their contribution to macroeconomic and financial stability and lengthened investor time horizons). In this paper I explore whether the potential of these policies to raise much‐needed tax revenues in developing countries augments their well‐known macroeconomic benefits. To my knowledge, there has been no effort to examine systematically the public finance issues related to the taxation of international private capital flows or securities transactions in the developing country context. I conclude that the public finance implications of these policies in middle‐income developing countries offers additional support to the macroeconomic case for them. To different degrees, taxation of international private capital flows and securities transactions has the potential to raise modest revenues in middle‐income countries. However, far more important is the potential of these policies to offer valuable macroeconomic dividends on the national level. These national macroeconomic dividends have the potential to bear fruit globally. This is because experiences with financial contagion over the last decade suggest that global financial stability can be enhanced via the promotion of domestic financial stability in developing countries.     

Financial development,institutional quality and maximizing-growth trade-off in government finance

This paper studies monetary and fiscal policies in an endogenous growth model with transaction costs. We show that the relation between long-run economic growth and both monetary and fiscal policies is subject to threshold effects, a result that gives account of a number of recent empirical findings. Furthermore, the model shows that, to finance public expenditures, growth-maximizing governments must choose relatively high seigniorage (respectively income taxation), if “institutional quality” and “financial development” indicators are low (respectively high). Thus, our model may explain why some governments resort to seigniorage and inflationary finance, and others rather resort to high tax rates, as a result of growth-maximizing strategies in different structural environments (notably concerning institutional and financial development contexts). In addition, the model allows examining how the optimal mix of government finance changes in response to different public debt contexts. A short empirical section confirms our theoretical results.     

On the Growth Implications of Foreign Aid for Public Investment Co-Financing

In this paper we present an endogenous growth model with foreign transfers for public capital formation in order to analyze the implications for growth maximization when the public sector in recipient countries co‐finances investment projects. Our main innovation is to show that, first, there is a unique growth‐maximizing absorption rate of funds that decreases with the co‐financing ratio and, second, that high amounts of assistance may be an impediment to growth due to the excess domestic taxation required to co‐finance investment projects. We then derive a policy rule for designing the growth‐maximizing co‐financing share under a given level of assistance. Finally, we also highlight some implications for EU regional policies, which aim at fostering growth in poorer EU countries by co‐financing public capital formation.     

Economic Theory and the Problem of Translation

Institutionalism was the dominant approach to public finance prior to WWII, after which it was eclipsed by Pigouvianism and Keynesianism. This transition defined the career of Wisconsin’s Harold M. Groves (1897–1969). Groves was a notable public finance economist, leading textbook author, and drafter of significant tax and labor legislation. He represented the culmination of a multigenerational institutionalist tradition. In this paper, I examine Groves and postwar public finance as a test case for the legacy of Wisconsin institutionalism. To that end, I consider Groves’s contributions to postwar tax policy, his interactions with Henry C. Simons and Richard M. Musgrave, and his view on Keynesian public finance. I identify some Wisconsin institutionalist contributions to modern public finance and offer an explanation for the postwar decline in institutional public finance.     

科技金融政策如何促进城市绿色创新发展——来自“科技和金融结合试点政策”的证据

借助科技和金融结合试点政策“准自然实验”，基于2004—2019年中国内地地级市面板数据，使用双重差分法评估科技和金融结合试点政策对绿色创新的影响。研究发现，试点政策显著促进绿色创新发展，且随着试点政策的不断推进，这种促进作用呈现持续增强的动态演化规律。机制研究结果表明，试点政策对绿色创新的促进作用通过拓展公共科技金融资源和市场科技金融资源得以实现。异质性研究结果表明，创新资源投入越丰富、创新能力越强的城市，这种促进作用越显著。试点政策不仅有助于提升城市绿色创新水平，还有利于提高绿色全要素生产率。研究结论可为试点政策的进一步推广提供有效支撑，并为城市绿色发展提供重要启示。     

财政发展与建设社会主义新农村:挑战与策略

建设社会主义新农村是我国现代化进程中的重大历史任务,是促进农村发展,实现共同富裕的现实举措.我国的财政支农政策经历了不同的发展时期,对农业生产、农民生活和农村发展的重视程度和支持模式大不相同,效果也有所差异.现阶段,在科学发展观的统领下,公共财政体系在解决"三农"问题上扮演的角色越来越重大,公共支出政策应坚持"多予、少取、放活"的方针,将公共财政的阳光普照到农村大地,为构建社会主义和谐社会提供坚实的保障.     

Corruption and public finance: an IMF perspective

Public finance should be a means whereby governments in low-income countries are able to increase economic growth and end poverty. Corruption, however, reduces tax revenue and makes public expenditure policies ineffective for achieving social objectives. The papers in this volume, which is sponsored by the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), describe how corruption makes public finance ineffective in promoting economic development.     

Canadian contributions to family economics

Canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics. These include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets, and of how decisions are made in multi‐person households. Several were early contributors to the literature on married women's labour supply and labour supply in a family context, and helped to develop empirical methods in this area. A particular focus has been on the impacts of policy‐relevant parameters, such childcare costs, on family labour supply and child well‐being. New work on child development, the impact of early life conditions, and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well‐being.     

The Political Economy of Xenophobia and Distribution: The Case of Denmark*

For the first time in some years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenry's disaffection with social‐democratic policies on immigration. We represent political competition in Denmark as taking place over two issues—the size of the public sector and immigration—and model political equilibrium using the party unanimity Nash equilibrium (PUNE) concept, which generates equilibria on multi‐dimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount between 12% and 36% of one standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens' ideal points of the size of the public sector.     

The efficiency of decentralized environmental policies under global pollution and tradable emission permits

We build a two asymmetric regions model with cross‐border pollution related to production. Each region issues emission permits and revenues from their sales finance public pollution abatement. The decentralized level of emission permits is efficient when permits are interregionally tradable and cross‐border pollution is perfect. This result is robust in a variety of cases—for example, when (i) capital is immobile or internationally mobile or only mobile between the two regions, and (ii) revenue from permits sales is transferred to a federal authority.     

Economic Aspects of Loneliness in Australia

We highlight the problem of loneliness, and argue that it is not only a public health issue but also an economic problem. We provide a brief review of findings from the key literature on the associations between loneliness, mental and physical health, and healthcare costs; and then present some evidence on its trends, the extent of socioeconomic inequalities and its links with health and healthcare usage, in Australia. We hope to encourage further economics research on loneliness, and related issues of social isolation and poor social support, to aid the design of policies and interventions to reduce loneliness.     

科技与金融结合对全要素生产率的影响——基于“促进科技和金融结合试点”准自然实验的经验证据

将科技和金融结合试点政策视为一项准自然实验,基于2005—2017年中国283个城市数据,采用双重差分法评估科技和金融结合试点政策对全要素生产率的影响。结果发现：①科技和金融结合试点政策对全要素生产率具有正向影响且通过了显著性水平检验;②科技和金融结合试点政策主要通过提高城市创新水平和融资能力等途径促进全要素生产率增长,创新水平、融资能力在科技和金融结合试点与全要素生产率间起中介作用;③科技和金融结合试点政策对全要素生产率的影响存在异质性,经济发展水平较高、金融发展水平较高的城市,科技和金融结合试点政策对全要素生产率的影响更大。由此建议,加大金融资源支持力度,缓解企业融资约束,加强政府对创新的支持。