The tax versus debt controversy in a multivariate cointegrating system

The empirical literature is replete with evidence that budget deficits and government debt affect (traditional view) or do not appreciably affect (Ricardian equivalence) private consumption. However, the validity of the relative empirical estimates can be questioned to the extent that they do not adequately distinguish among countries with varying levels of indebtedness. The present paper attempts to address this problem by using Johansen's cointegration technique and by sorting the sample countries into groups, according to the ratio of debt to GDP. The empirical evidence generated finds support for the debt-illusion hypothesis as a means of expounding variations in consumers' behaviour among countries with varying degrees of indebtedness.     

A reconsideration of the public sector's contribution to growth

A recent development in macroeconomic theory suggests that public investmentper se is relevant to economic growth, without regard to the means of financing government activity. This study undertakes an empirical investigation of this proposition, comparing two subperiods of the manufacturing sector's performance in Greece. Our test results support the conventional view that the size of public capital formation and the real intertemporal allocation of public sector may be important for determining manufacturing costs and profits but public deficits are likely to be of comparable or even dominating importance in determining manufacturing output. The emphasis on the financial as opposed to the real aspects of the government's decisions allows the establishment of a benchmark model as an appealing alternative to the newclassical analysis.     

Optimal Sovereign Debt for an Overdebted Country

In this study, the role of debt maturity is analysed in a framework that blends a number of key macro‐economic factors with a process of estimating an optimal debt maturity maximising net present value. The purpose is to reduce the real value of government liabilities for a highly indebted country, as for example in the case of Greece, over a 35‐year period. The conclusion that emerges is that management of debt maturity is an essential component of the equilibrium policy and, as such, it can play an important role both in implementing tax smoothing programmes and in reducing costs associated with debt financing.     

Revising the conventional tax-effort principle

The standard methodology on tax-effort (i.e., the ratio of actual tax revenue to its optimal level) is to run a regression of actual tax revenue on countries’ specific (macroeconomic, demographic, geographical, political, social, and institutional) variables. The resulting predicted (fitted) values are then taken to represent the optimal (desired or maximum) level of tax revenue. The crucial issue of tracing out how the optimal tax revenue should be allocated to the fiscal objectives (equity, efficiency) does not seem to be of any interest to the researchers on tax-effort. The present paper argues that the standard methodology is not without faults and needs revising. We demonstrate that an optimal tax system can be safely derived from maximizing a utility function with respect to (in)direct tax rates. The manipulation of the first-order conditions, using a novel mathematical module, leads to an infinite number of optimal direct–indirect tax rates. The selection of the optimal mix of these tax rates is dependent on the country-specific households’ preferences over equity/efficiency, as they are formulated by voters’ volition in election periods. A simulation procedure helps understanding how the optimal tax revenue is chosen and how it can be optimally allocated to fiscal objectives, in the context of a panel data set including a large number of developed and developing countries. Throughout our text, the optimal tax revenue is defined as the sum of the products of the optimal (in)direct tax rates and their corresponding tax bases. In the simple Arrow–Debreu economy, the above sum is shown to be equal to the difference between income and consumption.     

Public sector and economic growth: the Greek experience

Over the past two decades there has been an increase in the relative size of the public sector, accompanied by a decline in the growth performance of the Greek economy. In an attempt to highlight the contribution of the government size to growth, an analytical framework is developed, incorporating the possibility that marginal factor productivities are not equal in the public and private sectors. Econometric analysis utilizing this framework points to a negative relationship between government size and economic growth. This seems to derive, in part, from intersectoral diseconomies generated by the growing share of deft-financed government activities.     

A macroeconomic approach to the income-tax work-effort relationship

In this paper, we analyse the dynamic relationship between hours worked per employee (per self-employed) and marginal income tax-rate shocks in terms of both a comparative-dynamics model and a stochastic general equilibrium econometric model. The econometric model is estimated for Germany, UK and USA over the post-1960 period using the GMM estimation technique. Estimates in both models show that increases in the marginal income-tax rate exert negative effects on hours worked by both employees and the self-employed, but the response of the employees who are subject to tax withholding is stronger than the response of the self-employed.