E62 - Fiscal PolicyReturn

This paper examines the effects of public debt on the growth rate, investment and domestic credit provided to private sector using the dynamic panel threshold regression method for a large number of developing countries, namely 53 (48) economies for growth and invest-ment (credit) regressions. Our results suggest that public debt does not have a significant impact on the economic growth rate. Despite a strong negative effect of public debt on the total investment, our results do not support the existence of a (strong) threshold effect of public debt on total (private) investment. On the other hand, we present evidence for a threshold effect of public debt on public investment and credit. More precisely, public debt leads to a reduction in public investment and credit when the public debt exceeds the estimated threshold levels. Since public debt matters for investment and credit, it is important to ensure fiscal discipline and prudence in the long term.

This study aims to estimate a dynamic fiscal reaction function in a state-space setting to obtain time-varying reaction parameters for appraising the evolution of public debt sustainability in Turkey. The data set used for estimation is the longest for Turkey in the literature. Succinctly speaking, this function quantifies the corrective fiscal efforts exerted to preserve the stability of public debt. The time-varying estimation findings in this study suggest that the recent fiscal history of Turkey can be divided into two subperiods in terms of fiscal stability. Before the mid-1990s, no systematic fiscal response existed to restore the stability of public debt, whereas after the mid-1990s, a remarkable effort was evidenced by the positive fiscal reaction parameters. Notwithstanding some 20 years of strong positive reactions, the former performance appears to be far-off in recent years, and the strength of fiscal reaction has waned gradually, which is perturbing for the future course of fiscal sustainability.

Uncertainty is one of the most important issues for economic actors. Uncertainty about tax, expenditure and debt policy has an impact on the economy. The central question in this study asks how fiscal policy uncertainty affects the Turkish economy. First, we quantify Turkey's fiscal policy uncertainty index based on volatility measurements between 1998Q1 and 2020Q4. This index represents major fiscal, economic and political incidents in Turkey. Next, we analyse the effects of fiscal policy uncertainty on the Turkish economy using a VAR model. Our study finds that fiscal policy uncertainty shocks have detrimental and long-lasting effects on the Turkish economy. The results indicated that a positive standard deviation shock in fiscal policy uncertainty decreases the confidence, output and consumption. The findings of this study reveal critical fiscal policy implications for decision-makers. These findings imply that reducing Turkey's fiscal policy uncertainty is a critical policy priority for the business cycle fluctuations.

Fiscal policy is an effective instrument in helping governments in developed countries overcome a recession with a high unemployment rate or a hot economy with a high inflation rate to keep the economy on a stable path. Does governance contribute significantly to keeping this goal in these countries? The study looks for an answer by empirically investigating the role of governance in the output gap - fiscal policy relationship for a group of 27 developed countries between 2002 and 2019. It employs the difference GMM Arellano-Bond estimators and the PMG estimator for estimation and robustness check. The results provide some interesting findings. Firstly, both public spending and government revenue are counter-cyclical, confirming the counter-cyclical fiscal policy in developed countries. Secondly, governance hinders the counter-cyclical fiscal policy. The findings imply some crucial policies for governments in developed countries in running the fiscal policy.

This paper presents the impact of fiscal councils in the European Union on public fi- nance. Using a fiscal reaction function, the impact of fiscal councils on the discretionary component of fiscal policy is examined. The impact of fiscal councils is a topical issue due to the fact that most EU countries have established fiscal councils in response to the EU legislation adopted after the last financial crisis. The empirical results imply that fiscal councils are complementary to numerical fiscal rules and instrumental for limiting deficit bias in the EU countries, most importantly through monitoring of compliance with fiscal rules and endorsement of macroeconomic and budgetary forecasts. Despite certain research limits, the empirical results point to similar conclusions as from recent papers. Out of the empirical findings, several recommendations can be made for fiscal policy-making.

Multinational enterprises apply aggressive tax planning (ATP) to optimize global tax liability usually by combining parameters of different tax systems in both national jurisdictions and double tax treaties. At a macroeconomic level, the implementation of various optimization schemes affects the given values of the balance of payments. By conducting econometric analysis, the present paper examines the extent to which selected optimization schemes can be traced in the Czech Republic's balance of payments. The results show that payments for counselling services and royalties flow mostly to locations with low corporate tax rates, which may suggest an attempt to shift the tax base. Moreover, dividend and interest yields tend to move to countries with high foreign direct investments (FDIs) and balanced ratios between FDIs received and made, indicating that they are only conduit (transit) countries through which profits are transferred to another destination.

Global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU) is one of important phenomena in the global economy; it can impact on the overall economic performance and stock market per-formance, regardless of the status of the world economy. Thus, this paper empirically investigates the impact of global economic policy uncertainty on the Malaysian stock market over the period from 10:2003 to 2017:03. Using the GARCH model, the study demonstrates that global policy uncertainty affects the Malaysian stock market negatively. Similarly, the SVAR model also shows results consistent with the GARCH estimation. Nevertheless, the Markov switching estimation uncovers that global policy uncertainty has negative impacts on stock market performance in both low and high volatile market states. The impact is, however, greater during the high volatile state. Hence, the relationship between global economic policy uncertainty and stock market returns tends to be asymmetric. The overall empirical results infer that global economic policy uncertainty has some implications for asset pricing.

I take a Bayesian approach to estimate and forecast the effects of fiscal stimulus in various versions of the model by Smets and Wouters (2007) for the US economy. Specifically, I proxy various simpler DSGE sub-models by imposing a tight prior on a single parameter or a combination of tight priors on multiple parameters in the Smets-Wouters model. I find that the present-value government spending multipliers obtained are all in a reasonable range. Moreover, I forecast the effect of fiscal stimulus in a scenario similar to the 2008/2009 recession in the US, where the public expects a large and temporary increase in government spending to stimulate a fragile economy. The forecasts, generated individually by a group of representative models, are weighted averaging by means of the posterior model probabilities that are computed on the basis of their corresponding marginal data densities. According to the Diebold-Mariano test, I find that the forecast error of the combination forecast, computed via Bayesian model averaging (BMA), is statistically larger than the individual forecast, obtained only from the one that has the best fit among those DSGE models.

This paper investigates the government spending-revenue nexus for Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovenia by using quarterly data and a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach to cointegration. Our empirical findings support the fiscal synchronization for Slovenia, spend-tax for Czechia, tax-spend for Croatia and Hungary, and institutional separation or fiscal neutrality for Romania and Poland in the long run. Moreover, we find an asymmetric effect for Croatia, Czechia, Hungary and Poland in the long run and for all the countries in the short run. Therefore, our results clearly highlight the importance of asymmetric effects in government spending-revenue nexus. Our findings have some policy implications for these countries, such as providing a better coordination of government spending and revenue decisions and paying attention to the asymmetries.

An essential part of the EU's growth strategy is support to its own international competitiveness. The reason is that the domestic industry is losing its former positions and is being pushed out of both domestic and international markets. Developments on the international steel market over the last year confirm that the market is likely to see significant changes as a result of protective measures. Most of them will jeopardise the international competitiveness of the European steel industry with negative impacts on its overall economic growth. The aim of this paper is to analyse the influence of energy prices and, based on an international comparison of production conditions, identify the comparative advantages of the EU in this segment. For this purpose, use will be made of the RCA indicator and other research methods. The authors formulate some statements concerning the future development of this sector and the conditions which need to be satisfied to boost its competitiveness.

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 aim of this paper is to investigate public finance sustainability for a selected group of ten Central and Eastern European countries. In order to assess the fiscal sustainability of these countries we extend standard analyses typically used for developed countries to our group of ten CEE countries. To assess fiscal sustainability we use panel stationarity and cointegration tests, as well as estimates of certain parameters of fiscal reaction functions. Our research shows that despite the financial turmoil, CEE countries demonstrate the existence of a long-term relationship between revenues and expenditures and they have statistically relevant parameters of the fiscal reaction function. This indicates that the public finances in CEE countries are sustainable despite the crisis. However, the analysed group of countries shows sustainability only in a weak sense, which may pose a threat to public finances in the future.

This paper attempts to assess how compatible China is with respect to its dollar-based exchange rate regime. Assessment is made in terms of the real convergence criteria suggested by the optimum currency areas (OCA) theory. In light of the endogenous problem in OCA analysis and this view of convergence criteria, the relevant features of China are evaluated against economies implementing rigid dollar standard in practice, namely Hong Kong, Macau, and Panama. Findings suggest that economic conditions in China broadly conform to those prevailing in these economies which maintain strong links to the US dollar.

The primary balance has influenced the unit costs of debt servicing in 10 postsocialist members of the EU. The effects of the GDP growth and the inflation are equally robust and significant. The coefficients of lagged debt are at variance with the expectations from Bohn's 1998 paper, and one cannot speak until now about the corrective actions of fiscal authorities in these countries. Only Poland has had on average a higher real long-term interest rate than the growth rate. Other countries could stabilize their debt-GDP ratio by running a primary deficit. But comparing the level of investment with profits only in Slovenia one can speak about the dynamic inefficiency. Especially in the Czech Republic and Slovakia the relationship between debt and deficit is blurred by high negative stock-flow adjustments.

This paper studies whether the dynamic behaviour of real GDP, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and by changes of government in the Czech Republic. Two basic models of political cycles are tested - political business cycle models and partisan theories. Political business cycle models emphasize the opportunistic behaviour of incumbents who strive to get re-elected regardless of party affiliation. On the other hand, partisan politicians are faithful to their ideological opinions and therefore attract a specific constituency. The tests partly support the opportunistic motives for the behaviour of Czech politicians. On the contrary, suppositions of partisan motives were not proved.

Within the non-stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model framework this paper examines the implications of alternative fiscal consolidation programs for small open economy. The calibrated model enables realistically quantify the impact of the deficit financing and fiscal consolidation on consumption and saving of households, investment of firms and thereby on the capital stock and real interest rates. Through the interest rate link the impact of deficit financing and fiscal consolidation on cyclical and long-term properties of monetary policy set-up can be observed. Several fiscal consolidations were simulated in order to demonstrate the comparative statics and differences in dynamic paths of above mentioned variables.

The prevailing view in the literature is that the cost of debt servicing depends on the variables that determine the debt dynamics: primary balance, outstanding debt, economic growth and inflation. Several papers devoted to advanced market economies show that a stronger primary balance is associated with a lower cost of debt servicing. The interest cost of servicing the public debt is key both to its sustainability and to the burden it places on the public finances and the economy. A panel of four transition economies: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in the time period 1994 - 2002 has been analyzed. The question is if also in these countries much of the variation in the costs of servicing public debt can be explained in terms of fundamentals that determine the debt dynamics. Last but not least country-specific effects are discussed.