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September 1998 This paper offers simple, robust operational rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies-rules that are more complex than the border price rule but involve only one additional parameter: the marginal cost of funds. Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates within a clean, unified framework previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. Until recently it was widely believed that government projects could be evaluated without reference to the cost of raising tax revenues. The classic border price rule provided a simple and apparently robust procedure for project evaluation. But the border price rule developed in shadow pricing literature requires very strong assumptions to be valid when governments must rely on distortionary taxation and are unable or unwilling to cover the costs of the project through user charges. Anderson and Martin use a rigorous formal model in which governments must rely on distortionary taxation to explore the welfare consequences of governments providing different types of goods. They show that the border price rule is accurate only in one rather special case: when project outputs are sold at their full value to consumers - something that is difficult to do with a public good such as a lighthouse or a functioning judicial system. When a publicly provided good is sold for less than its full value to consumers, one must take into account the implications for government revenues of providing public goods. Anderson and Martin present project evaluation rules that are more complex than the border price rule but involve only one additional parameter: the compensated marginal cost of funds for the taxes on which the government relies. The rules suggested involve adjusting the fiscal revenues the project generates (or destroys) by the marginal cost of funds before comparing them with the assessed benefits to project producers and consumers. In the case of a protected but tradable good provided by the government, the result is a shadow price that is below the world market price. Where projects produce output that is sold without charge, the costs of the project inputs must also be adjusted using the marginal cost of funds. In intermediate cases where the government levies user charges that fall below the full value of the goods to the private sector, the revenue shortfall from the project must be adjusted by the marginal cost of funds. This paper-a product of Trade, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to assess the consequences of policy interventions. Will Martin may be contacted at [email protected].
This paper offers simple, ...
This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Using this new dataset, our estimates suggest fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on private domestic demand and GDP. By contrast, estimates based on conventional measures of the fiscal policy stance used in the literature support the expansionary fiscal contractions hypothesis but appear to be biased toward overstating expansionary effects.
This paper looks at the factors that have to be considered when designing an aggregate expenditure ceiling. It is argued that expenditure ceilings are effective in promoting fiscal discipline and sustainability, but that a number of trade-offs have to be made when setting up a fiscal framework that will survive in a politically charged environment. The paper illustrates the discussion with a case study of medium-term aggregate expenditure ceilings in three countries: Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
In the decade of the 1970s the U.S. economy experienced its worst performance in four decades. Rising U.S. inflation and stagnant productivity growth were responsible for the worst economic performance of any Western country. The institute has published a number of studies on specific economic problems—on energy, planning, health care, tax reform, international trade, and other subjects. This is our first attempt to present an integrated view of the economy as a whole, looking back at serious problems experienced in the 1970s as part of fashioning a systematic statement of what reforms are necessary to restore to the U.S. economy the growth and stability of prior decades.
World Bank Discussion Paper No. 318. Analyzes the condition needed for achieving sustainable private sector growth in the Visegrad countries--the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. The analysis focuses on the legal and regulatory framework and institutional capacity, the privatization of state enterprises, and private sector development.
This dissertation focuses on the consequences of labor market policies, environmental cap-and-trade policies, and monetary policy. These three types of economic policies are admittedly very distinct, but they are tied together by the type of analysis I employ to study these policies. For each, I develop a specific general equilibrium model aimed at highlighting the policy in question and use cutting-edge computational methods to numerically solve the model across an array of potential policies. In the first chapter, The Distributional Effects of Labor Adjustment Cost Policies, I introduce a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous plants and labor adjustment costs to explore both the aggregate and distributional effects of labor adjustment costs. I use the model to analyze the effects of policies that would repeal all or half of state-mandated firing costs in European countries. The model predicts that a full repeal of state-mandated firing costs in the average European country would increase aggregate labor productivity by 0.7%-6.2% while increasing the rate of job turnover by 65%-420%. In the second chapter, Emissions Allowance Allocation in Cap-and-Trade Policies, I present a version of "Impacts of Alternative Emissions Allowance Allocation Methods Under a Federal Cap-and-Trade Program", co-written with Lawrence H. Goulder and Michael Dworsky, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 60, Issue 3, November 2010, pages 161-181. To examine the implications of alternative allowance allocation designs for industry profits and GDP under a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we employ a general equilibrium model of the U.S. economy with a unique treatment of capital dynamics that permits close attention to profit impacts. Effects on profits depend critically on the relative reliance on auctioning or free allocation of allowances. Freely allocating fewer than 15\% of the emissions allowances generally suffices to prevent profit losses in the most vulnerable U.S. industries. Freely allocating all of the allowances substantially overcompensates these industries. When emissions allowances are auctioned and the proceeds are employed to finance cuts in income tax rates, GDP costs are about 33 percent lower than when all the allowances are freely allocated. The results are robust to policies differing in stringency, the availability of offsets, and the opportunities for intertemporal trading of allowances. In the final chapter, I present \textit{Interbank Lending and Monetary Policy in a DSGE Model}, which was written with Josephine Smith. We build a DSGE model with heterogeneous banks and interbank lending to explore how monetary policy should respond to shocks in the interbank lending market. To do this, we build upon the Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist \citeyear{bgg1999} model of the financial accelerator by introducing a monopolistically competitive banking sector. The model is the first of its kind to include a monopolistically competitive banking sector, heterogeneous banks, and an interbank lending market. We find that the heterogeneous monopolistically competitive banking sector mitigates macroeconomic variance in the model relative to a perfectly competitive banking sector. Multiple banks that imperfectly compete with each other can help absorb shocks better than a single representative bank and mitigate the financial accelerator effect. We also find that financial supply side shocks, as measured by shocks to the productivity of bank loan production, have a much greater effect on the real economy than the demand-side financial shocks. In addition, we find that shocks to the ex-ante most productive banks have a larger effect on the real economy than shocks to the ex-ante least productive banks because the banks with high productivity (ex-ante) have a larger share of the financial market. Analyzing the effect of shocks to interbank lending rates (relative to the central bank policy rate), we find large macroeconomic effects of such policies. Finally, we find that a monetary policy interest rate rule that incorporates the financial sector can actually dampen the effects of traditional non-financial shocks such as productivity, government spending, and monetary policy shocks and leads to a significant decrease in business-cycle volatility.
This book sheds light on the use of tax expenditures, mainly through a study of ten OECD countries: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. It highlights key trends and successful practices.