E60 - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook: GeneralReturn

This study estimates the impact of public debt on public investment in Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies. We implement Cross-sectionally Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) model, which effectively handles cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity, while dealing with short- and long-run coefficients simultaneously. The results indicate the existence of both short- and long-term crowding out effects of public debt on public investment in the CEE region. These findings have significant fiscal policy repercussions, particularly in context marked by constrained financial resources and substantial debt loads, as has been the case in a number of CEE economies.

We examine the relationship between the government size and economic growth by using threshold regression model and quarterly data over the period 1998:1-2015:1 for Turkey. Our results provide a strong evidence for the existence of a non-linear relationship. The estimated threshold levels, as a percentage of GDP, are 16.5 for the government total expenditures, 12.6 for consumption expenditures and 3.9 for investment expenditures. We find that an increase in the government size leads to a significant rise (decline) in economic growth rate when the government size is below (above) the threshold level, confirming the predictions of Armey curve. Our findings have a clear policy implication: since the realized government consumption and total expenditures are well above the estimated threshold levels, a reduction in the government size would boost the growth rate.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the relationship between government expenditure and economic growth in Turkey. The study tests the validity of Wagner's law by applying autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) cointegration technique using annual data over 1950-2010 period. In order to find out the possible impact of omitted variables, we first tested the standard bivariate versions of Wagner's law. In the next step by including a third variable - inflation ratio - the analysis extended on a trivariate system. The findings of each testing procedure indicate that omitted variables matter. Since, while there exists no long-run relationship between the variables in the first step of the testing procedure, a long-run correlation is found in the second step. The differences of this paper from the earlier studies testing the Law for Turkey are that, the causal link is examined within a trivariate framework and non-interest government expenditure is considered instead of total government expenditures.

The fiscal deficits in the majority of transition countries continue to deteriorate and pose risks for the sustainability of public finances in the longer time horizon. Due to short time span and data limitation (1993 - 2003) I concentrate on the short-run dynamics using fixed-effect model with panel data. I found a very small effects of fiscal deficits on inflation for the group of Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) with slightly better results after the exclusion of Poland. The perspective of adopting the euro in the horizon of several years has prevented until now the use of surprise inflation to reduce the real burden of servicing the increasing public debt. In the periods of social conflicts which are likely to characterize times of delayed fiscal reforms the temptation to resort to seignorage may become more stronger than nowadays.

After joining the EU in 2004, Slovenia and other new members will have to adopt the euro. Their accession to the European Monetary Union will require stabilizing and later fixing their exchange rates and thus restrictive monetary policy. The paper shows that successful stabilization of the exchange rate also requires restrictive fiscal policy. Fiscal policy that is not compatible with the goals of monetary policy would prevent stabilization of the exchange rate.