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This paper provides new empirical evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in developing economies. Using public investment forecast errors to identify unanticipated changes in public investment, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output in the short and medium term, with an average short-term fiscal multiplier of about 0.2. We find some evidence that the effects are larger: (i) during periods of slack; (ii) in economies operating with fixed exchange rate regimes; (iii) in more closed economies; (iv) in countries with lower public debt; and (v) in countries with higher investment efficiency. Finally, we show that increases in public investment tend to lower income inequality.
We construct unanticipated government spending shocks for 103 developing countries from 1990 to 2015 and study their effects on income distribution. We find that unanticipated fiscal consolidations lead to a long-lasting increase in income inequality, while fiscal expansions lower inequality. The results are robust to several measures of income distribution and size of the fiscal shocks, to an alternative identification strategy, across expansions and recessions and across country groups (low-income countries versus emerging markets). An additional contribution of the paper is the computation of the medium-term inequality multiplier. This is on average about 1 in our sample, meaning that a cumulative decrease in government spending of 1 percent of GDP over 5 years is associated with a cumulative increase in the Gini coefficient over the same period of about 1 percentage point. The multiplier is larger for total government expenditure than for public investment and consumption (with the former having larger effect), likely due to the redistributive role of transfers. Finally, we find that (unanticipated) fiscal consolidations lead to an increase in poverty.
This paper provides new evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in advanced economies. Using public investment forecast errors to identify the causal effect of government investment in a sample of 17 OECD economies since 1985 and model simulations, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output, both in the short term and in the long term, crowds in private investment, and reduces unemployment. Several factors shape the macroeconomic effects of public investment. When there is economic slack and monetary accommodation, demand effects are stronger, and the public-debt-to-GDP ratio may actually decline. Public investment is also more effective in boosting output in countries with higher public investment efficiency and when it is financed by issuing debt.
Throughout the 1990's, privatization of inefficient state-owned enterprises was strongly embraced in developing and transitional economies. Little attention has gone to the distributional implications of the privatization movement, a particularly surprising oversight given the current backlash in many settings against further privatization. This book offers a comprehensive set of country-specific studies on the effects of privatization on people --winners and losers in different income, employment, and education groups. The studies analyze the changes in public tax revenue from privatized enterprises, shifts in pension and other liabilities, and changes in income of different groups. Contributors include David McKenzie (Stanford University), Dilip Mookherjee (Boston University), Gover Barja (Universidad Católica Boliviana, La Paz), Miguel Urquiola (Columbia University), Samuel Freije (Universidad de Las Américas in Puebla, Mexico), Luis A. Rivas (Ministry of Finance and Central Bank of Nicaragua), Máximo Torero, Enrique Schroth, and Alberto Pasco Font (Group of Analysis for Development [GRADE], Lima), Roberto Macedo (University of São Paulo, Presbyterian Mackenzie University, and Foundation Institute of Economic Research, São Paolo), Antonio Estache (World Bank), Michael Bleyzer and Edi Segura (SigmaBleyzer Corporation), Gary H. Jefferson, (Brandeis University), Su Jian (Brandeis and Peking Universities), Jiang Yuan and Yu Xinhua (National Bureau of Statistics, Beijing), and Malathy Knight-John and P.P.A. Wasantha (Institute of Policy Studies, Sri Lanka).
We quantitatively investigate the macroeconomic and distributional impacts of fiscal consolidations in low-income countries (LICs) through value added tax (VAT), personal income tax (PIT), and corporate income tax (CIT). We extend the standard heterogeneous agents incomplete markets model by including multiple sectors and rural-urban distinction to capture salient features of LICs. We find that overall, VAT has the least efficiency costs but is highly regressive, while PIT impacts the economy in the opposite way with CIT staying in between. Cash transfers targeting rural households mitigate the negative distributional impacts of VAT most effectively, while public investment leads to little redistribution.
Despite sustained economic growth and rapid poverty reductions, income inequality remains stubbornly high in many low-income developing countries. This pattern is a concern as high levels of inequality can impair the sustainability of growth and macroeconomic stability, thereby also limiting countries’ ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. This underscores the importance of understanding how policies aimed at boosting economic growth affect income inequality. Using empirical and modeling techniques, the note confirms that macro-structural policies aimed at raising growth payoffs in low-income developing countries can have important distributional consequences, with the impact dependent on both the design of reforms and on country-specific economic characteristics. While there is no one-size-fits-all recipe, the note explores how governments can address adverse distributional consequences of reforms by designing reform packages to make pro-growth policies also more inclusive.
This paper provides new empirical evidence of the macroeconomic effects of public investment in developing economies. Using public investment forecast errors to identify unanticipated changes in public investment, the paper finds that increased public investment raises output in the short and medium term, with an average short-term fiscal multiplier of about 0.2. We find some evidence that the effects are larger: (i) during periods of slack; (ii) in economies operating with fixed exchange rate regimes; (iii) in more closed economies; (iv) in countries with lower public debt; and (v) in countries with higher investment efficiency. Finally, we show that increases in public investment tend to lower income inequality.
We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector. These features allow for a deeper examination of macroeconomic and fiscal policy programs and their impact on labor market outcomes, inequality, and poverty. The paper illustrates the model's properties by analyzing the growth, debt, and distributional consequences of big-push public investment programs with different mixes of investment in human capital and infrastructure. We show that investment in human capital is much more effective than investment in infrastructure in promoting long-run economic development when investments earn their average estimated returns. The decision about how much to invest in human capital versus infrastructure involves, however, an acute intertemporal trade-off. Because investment in education affects labor productivity with a long lag, it takes 15+ years before net national income, the private capital stock, real wages for the poor, and formal sector employment surpass their counterparts in a program that invests mainly in infrastructure. The ranking of alternative investment programs depends on the policymakers' social discount rate and on the weight of distributional objectives in the social welfare function.
In developed economies, wealth inequality is high, while public capital is underprovided. Here, we study the impact of heterogeneity in saving behavior and income sources on the distributional effects of public investment. A capital tax is levied to finance productive public capital in an economy with two types of households: high income households who save dynastically and middle income households who save for retirement. We find that inequality is reduced the higher the capital tax rate is and that low tax rates are Pareto-improving. There is no clear-cut trade-off between efficiency and equality: middle income households' consumption is maximal at a capital tax rate that is higher than the rate which maximizes high income households' consumption.
This publication is a practitioner's guide for analyzing the distributional impact of reforms to trade, monetary and exchange rate policy, utility provision, agricultural markets, land policy and education. These six areas of policy reform are the ones most likely to have an impact on distribution and poverty. Such analysis helps in policy formulation and development and for implementing poverty reduction strategies in developing countries. Each chapter in this volume provides an overview and guidance on the specific issues arising in the analysis of the distributional impacts of policy and institutional reforms in selected sectors.