Narrow Results

This study uses data from 1986 to 2021 and the auto-regressive distributed lag model to explore India’s fiscal policy determinants of government health spending. The results find two structural breaks in time: (i) 2002 for state government health spending (SGHS) and (ii) 2014 for central government health spending. The results also show that central revenue transfers to states have a positive and statistically significant effect on SGHS in the long run. The results imply that a 1% rise in central revenue transfers to states leads to a 0.399% increase in SGHS. Further, state government public debt exhibits a negative and statistically significant relationship with SGHS, implying that a 1% rise in public debt leads to a 0.119% fall in SGHS in the long run. Fiscal management (i.e., revenue mobilization and debt sustainability) is essential to prepare a long-term strategy for health-care financing.

Barry and Devereux (2003) have identified two conditions for permanent fiscal contractions to be expansionary. The first condition is that households do not face an effective infinite horizon. The second is that the wealth effect of reduced tax liabilities on labor supply must be small if labor supply is endogenous. However, Barry and Devereux have not allowed for the possibility that government spending may affect the intertemporal allocation of private consumption. By allowing for the possibility, this paper identifies a third condition for permanent fiscal contractions to be expansionary, namely that public and private consumption must not be too highly substitutable.

The current general wisdom regarding fiscal policy in response to fluctuations in economic cycles is to adopt countercyclical strategies: contractive during a boom to avoid overheating the economy and expansive during a recession to stimulate economic activity. This paper attempts to investigate the practical behavior of fiscal policy in Indonesia in response to economic cycles to establish whether it follows general fiscal wisdom (countercyclical) or amplifies the cycle (procyclical). An error correction model (ECM) and an alternative model to deal with the possible endogeneity problem are utilized. This paper shows that fiscal policy in Indonesia tends to be procyclical. Observations of some other ASEAN countries, namely Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, indicate that Singapore could be the only country in ASEAN that is able to implement a countercyclical fiscal policy.

The paper attempts to analyze the impact of fiscal policy on economic growth while considering level of development and controlling for state of institutions. We extend the Solow growth model by incorporating fiscal policy and institutions through using total factor productivity. Our empirical analysis includes a panel of 56 countries. The empirics demonstrate that impact of fiscal policy on growth is statistically insignificant in the full sample. However, splitting the sample into developed and developing economies, positive association with economic growth in developed economies and negative association in developing economies observed. Our findings thus inform that fiscal policy contributes positively to growth only in developed economies. The reason for this seems to be an enabling institutional environment in developed economies. This kind of enabling institutional environment allows fiscal policy to play positive role in developed economies and absence of such environment contributes to the negative impact of fiscal policy in developing economies.

We develop a simple model with endogenous rural–urban migration to analyze the implications of migration restrictions for economic welfare. The model reveals that a combination of an efficient urban bias in public service provision and internal migration restrictions can raise social welfare. Our results suggest that migration restrictions should be carefully assessed as a policy choice rather than immediately dismissed as suboptimal. However, even when restrictions raise social welfare, they increase urban households’ welfare at the expense of rural households’ welfare, creating an equity tradeoff for policy-makers to consider.

This paper utilizes network data envelopment analysis and the second-order cone programming approach to evaluate the performance of 20 Taiwanese local governments (which consist of 6 municipal governments and 14 non-municipal governments). We first explore the fiscal policies in local governments using non-parametric methods. Second, this study develops an innovative two-stage process to measure the effects of fiscal policies to economic efficiency and fiscal effectiveness of 20 local governments for from 2010 to 2016. Several findings are summarized as follows. (1) Non-parametric results reveal that current and capital expenditures, as well as tax and non-tax revenue of municipal governments, were higher than non-municipal governments. (2) The municipal governments have a higher economic efficiency level and fiscal effectiveness yearly and on average based on the two-stage efficiency scores. Overall, empirical results provide insights to local governments on the efforts to integrate resources that will exert a synergistic effect on governance performance. To mitigate economic problems arising from increasing fiscal deficits, it is recommended to implement forward-looking policies and allocate government funds wisely during the early expansion stage. This can be achieved by analyzing tax systems and adopting fiscal policies that boost tax revenue and enhance overall fiscal effectiveness.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the 2007 financial tsunami on the Taiwanese financial market. We find that, although significant for banks, security firms, and insurance companies, the effect was relatively lower if compared with that in Europe and the United States. In addition, we present fiscal and monetary policies issued by the Taiwanese government in reaction to the global financial crisis. These policy measures focused on stabilizing the financial market, reducing the level of unemployment, and creating more lending opportunities in support of Taiwanese companies. We also discuss the policy measures of the US government and other Asian countries in relation to the global financial crisis. Finally, we provide some suggestions to improve financial supervision and enhance financial reforms in Taiwan.

This study aimed to provide a game-theoretic interpretation of the analyses of involuntary unemployment by deficiency of aggregate demand and fiscal policy to achieve full employment using an overlapping generations model. We showed that involuntary unemployment is in a Nash equilibrium of a game with a firm and consumers. Moreover, we showed that full employment can be achieved through fiscal policies that create budget deficits in recessionary conditions with involuntary unemployment. Once full employment is achieved, it can be sustained without a budget deficit.

As a retrospective exploration of China’s central–local relations over the past four decades of the reform era, this paper argues that since the mid-1990s, relations have evolved with a growing likelihood to break away from the vicious cycle of decentralization and recentralization since 1949. China’s post-reform era started in synchronization with a sweeping move toward decentralization, a trend which generated a myriad of systemic crises that threatened the legitimacy and survival of the regime. Thus, the mid-1990s saw a systematic rollback of decentralization. This rollback is to be understood as a comprehensive scheme of rebalancing rather than a mere replication of pre-reform recentralization. On the other hand, the rebalancing has still occurred in consistence with a cyclical pattern that had characterized the broadly conceived regularity of decentralization and recentralization. While the rebalancing has not been immune from various pathologies, the central state has selected to make contingent and marginal adaptations to cope with the problems instead of shattering the current framework of rebalancing and returning completely to decentralization. Instead of relying solely on original research, this paper will bolster its main argument by conducting a synthetic reasoning from a rich array of extant analyses to sketch out the contours of China’s central–local relations in fiscal, investment, and personnel management policy areas during the past four decades.

This paper focuses on the implications of the economic crisis and recession of 2008–2009 for climate change and related policy responses. Stressing that even prolonged output losses make very little difference to appropriate emissions reduction objectives, the paper argues that a cautious shift towards a more aggressive path of carbon pricing need not impede recovery and could make a valuable contribution to addressing looming fiscal challenges. Well-designed and monitored "green" stimulus measures can help sustain aggregate demand during the downturn, while increased climate-related public spending will likely be needed into the longer-term. However, it is critical to avoid undue reliance on spending rather than tax measures, particularly as the recovery strengthens.

Amid a still fragile economic environment, and rising concerns about deteriorating environmental conditions, policy-makers are examining the potential for new sources of environmentally sustainable growth and job creation. A "green economy" has emerged as an important concept linking economic growth and environmental sustainability. This paper emphasises the potentially significant opportunities to enhance welfare from better management of scarce environmental and natural resources, including through the reduction and removal of large distortions arising from environmentally harmful subsidies. It emphasises the centrality of fiscal (and in particular tax based) measures, as part of a portfolio of policies necessary to mobilise the resources, both public and private, for such an economic transformation to be effective and equitable.

Concerns have been raised that the "new normal" — a period of high unemployment, low returns on investment, high risks, and low growth — may become protracted in advanced economies. The world, therefore, needs a growth-lifting strategy. This strategy could take the form of a global infrastructure investment initiative that goes beyond the borders of advanced countries. Economic returns to infrastructure investments are high in developing countries, which have become important drivers of global growth. At the same time, infrastructure investments require capital goods, most of which are produced in high-income countries. Scaling up infrastructure investment in developing countries could, therefore, help generate a virtuous cycle in support of a global recovery.

In this paper, we compare and analyze the differences in the effects of fiscal and monetary policy using time-varying parameter structural vector auto-regression (TVP-VAR). Specifically, we estimate a 5-variable TVP-VAR model using monthly data from March 2001 to August 2017. The estimation results indicated the following four points. First, expansionary fiscal policy can impact GDP faster than an expansionary monetary policy. Second, expansionary fiscal policy has lowered prices. Third, an expansionary monetary policy can increase GDP more persistently than an expansionary fiscal policy during unconventional monetary policy periods. Finally, expansionary monetary policy has raised prices. These estimation results reveal that if the Japanese government wants to strongly boost GDP alone, it should use fiscal policy alongside monetary policy because fiscal policy can immediately raise GDP. If the Japanese government seeks moderate increases in both GDP and prices, it is more effective to use monetary policy alone without increasing fiscal expenditure.

There has been controversy about the appropriate responses of monetary and fiscal policies to sudden stops of capital inflows. There have been concerns that expansionary policies could undermine confidence leading to currency depreciation and a worsening of the crisis. Previous literature has generally found favorable effects from fiscal expansion and mixed results for monetary policy. We revisit this issue using more recent data and alternative measures of monetary policy. We find considerable support for the view that expansionary monetary policy reduces output costs of sudden stops and no significant evidence that the costs are increased. We find that fiscal expansion by countries with low levels of debt is expansionary, but that these effects can become negative at high levels of debt.

We empirically investigate the role of fiscal policies on criminal activity using a sample of 25 EU countries over the period 2000–2013. Our analysis indicates that tight fiscal policies appear to have a positive effect on crime. This effect becomes stronger when property (non-violent) crime rates are considered. Further, the presence of high levels of shadow economy in a country provides a very strong mitigating factor on the adverse effect of public policies on crime. The initially strong link between tight fiscal policy and non-violent crime weakens significantly in the presence of undocumented economic activities which compensate for the lack of formal economic opportunities.

The question of whether private and public consumption are complements or substitutes has been an issue of concern and hence, attracted the attention of researchers and policy think tanks. This study therefore investigates this important phenomenon within the context of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to inform the design of fiscal policy measures. Using panel data spanning the period 1981–2016 for 21 sub-Saharan African countries, the results indicate that, government and private consumption are substitutes. This indicates that government spending crowds out private consumption in the sub region. Vital policy implications have been provided for consideration based on the findings.

The aim of this study is to analyze how oil price shocks affect the economic growth of floating exchange rate regimes and fixed exchange rate regimes in oil-exporting countries with a ratio of oil exports to total exports exceeding 70%. Also, this study seeks to determine what monetary and fiscal policies both regimes apply in order to curb business cycles and reduce inflationary and recessionary gaps. The analytical study uses panel data for the period from 1991 to 2019, covering 24 oil-exporting countries, from the World Economic Outlook (WEO) database and World Bank. The econometric model is estimated by applying a panel VECM to examine the short- and long-term interdependencies in the macroeconomic variables. The results demonstrate that when there is a negative shock to the oil price, the exchange rate of the floating exchange rate regimes depreciates, money supply increases, and government spending decreases. In contrast, the exchange rate of the fixed exchange rate regimes fluctuates slightly; the money supply slightly decreases in the near, medium, and long term; and government spending decreases.

In this paper, we examine a public debt stabilization in a country under inflation targeting by arguing that bond yields are sensitive to inflation risks. Endogenously defining the convenience premium function, we focus on fiscal and monetary strategic interactions within an optimal control setting. The level of the debt-to-gross domestic produced (GDP) ratio and current inflation rate of the country are considered as the state variables in the game. We then focus on the convenience risk premium and rate of inflation as market-based disciplining devices, to articulate the Nash noncooperative equilibria, cooperative equilibria and Stackelberg equilibria via a feedback control strategy. We show that the outcome of the game depends on the parameters of the game, the type of equilibrium one considers and the decision horizon. When the current inflation rate follows an uncontrolled Ornstein–Uhlenbeck dynamic process, we highlight its effects on the growth rate of the debt ratio. Hence, our model provides a novel framework in which monetary and fiscal authorities can simultaneously achieve their individual interests, while achieving an optimal debt stabilization policy in the presence of inflation. We also highlight the need for governments to adopt policy-approaches which maintain the debt-to-GDP ratio under an inflation-dependent ceiling.

Issues concerning the consequences of trade liberalization and the resulting reduction in domestic fiscal budgets have always been the 'hot' topic in the trade policy community. This paper approaches this issue by focusing on the experience of the Israeli economy in the twenty year period (1984-2005) where Israel undertook both major tariff liberalization and a related domestic tax reform, with no reversion to border taxes. The Israeli experience highlights the initial budget revenue concerns associated with tariff liberalization, and quickly moves the issue away from border tax substitutes to domestic issues concerning enforcement. By de-linking the two issues the paper demonstrates that it is feasible to successfully tackling both external and internal tax reforms. Furthermore, it demonstrates that it is possible not to fall into the trap of looking at border taxes as a cure for internal high costs of tax revenue. The appropriate prescription for other developing or newly industrialized countries is to de-link the two tax issues, focus on the collection side of the domestic tax structure while at the same time reducing local taxes and broadening the tax base.