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The eight chapters in this volume fall into three subject areas: government budget management and control, federal entitlement programs, and attempts to influence private sector behavior through tax code management.Policymakers are often hard-pressed to understand what economists have to say on policy issues, and scholars and students need to know what the latest research findings are and what questions remain unanswered. Fiscal Policy: Lessons from Economic Research presents the work of leading contributors to the public finance literature. The papers were originally presented at a 1996 conference sponsored by the Robert D. Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance at the University of California, Berkeley. Although the papers are broad in scope, they are not intended to be neutral, comprehensive surveys of the literature. Instead, authors were encouraged to focus on the issues they thought most important or interesting. The conference confirmed that on some questions there is a broad consensus, and on others there is strong disagreement. Because perspectives differ, after each paper two discussants offer their own views on the subject. More so than in many conference volumes, these comments are an integral part of each presentation. The eight chapters fall into three subject areas: government budget management and control, federal entitlement programs, and attempts to influence private sector behavior through tax code management.ContributorsHenry J. Aaron, B. Douglas Bernheim, David M. Cutler, Nada Eissa, Jeffrey Frankel, William G. Gale, Roger H. Gordon, Edward M. Gramlich, Bronwyn H. Hall, Kevin A. Hassett, James R. Hines, Jr., Hilary Williamson Hoynes, R. Glenn Hubbard, Robert P. Inman, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Robert A. Moffitt, Joseph P. Newhouse, James M. Poterba, John M. Quigley, Robert D. Reischauer, David Romer, Daniel L. Rubinfeld, John B. Shoven, Jonathan S. Skinner, Joel Slemrod, John B. Taylor
This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal multipliers are overwhelmingly positive but small. However, there is some evidence of negative fiscal multipliers.
Only a few empirical studies have analyzed the relationship between fiscal multipliers and the underlying state of the economy. This paper investigates this link on a country-by-country basis for the G7 economies (excluding Italy). Our results show that fiscal multipliers differ across countries, calling for a tailored use of fiscal policy. Moreover, the position in the business cycle affects the impact of fiscal policy on output: on average, government spending, and revenue multipliers tend to be larger in downturns than in expansions. This asymmetry has implications for the choice between an upfront fiscal adjustment versus a more gradual approach.
Fiscal policy in Latin America has been guided primarily by short-term liquidity targets whose observance was taken as the main exponent of fiscal prudence, with attention focused almost exclusively on the levels of public debt and the cash deficit. Very little attention was paid to the effects of fiscal policy on growth and on macroeconomic volatility over the cycle. Important issues such as the composition of public expenditures (and its effects on growth), the ability of fiscal policy to stabilize cyclical fluctuations, and the currency composition of public debt were largely neglected. As a result, fiscal policy has often amplified cyclical volatility and dampened growth. 'Fiscal Policy, Stabilization, and Growth' explores the conduct of fiscal policy in Latin America and its consequences for macroeconomic stability and long-term growth. In particular, the book highlights the procyclical and anti-investment biases embedded in the region's fiscal policies, explores their causes and macroeconomic consequences, and asesses their possible solutions.
Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.
This paper explores how fiscal policy can affect medium- to long-term growth. It identifies the main channels through which fiscal policy can influence growth and distills practical lessons for policymakers. The particular mix of policy measures, however, will depend on country-specific conditions, capacities, and preferences. The paper draws on the Fund’s extensive technical assistance on fiscal reforms as well as several analytical studies, including a novel approach for country studies, a statistical analysis of growth accelerations following fiscal reforms, and simulations of an endogenous growth model.
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.
While recent developments in monetary theory have been fast to spread to policy analysis and practice and the media, the same is not true of fiscal policy, and a void has emerged. Issues such as timing, cyclical adjustments, long-term sustainability, and social implications are often seen as detached from discussions in the public arena. This book fills this gap. It delivers a keen assessment of the role and scope of current fiscal policy. New contributions and critical reviews of state of the art research analyze fiscal policy in terms of viability, potency, consequences and sustainability, and also shed light on its relation to economic and political ideas. The general tone of this volume is cautiously favourable of fiscal activism, although the emphasis is placed more on medium-term adjustments than on short-term ‘fine-tuning’. The authors believe that the legacy of the last fiscal revolution has been an excessively negative view of deficits and debt, and believe that this volume will contribute to open a dialogue on fiscal issues, and bring back a more balanced view of fiscal policy. With contributions from leading authorities including Barbara Bergmann, Jeffrey Frankel and David Colander, this is a major new contribution to the field.
The recent recession has brought fiscal policy back to the forefront, with economists and policy makers struggling to reach a consensus on highly political issues like tax rates and government spending. At the heart of the debate are fiscal multipliers, whose size and sensitivity determine the power of such policies to influence economic growth. Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis focuses on the effects of fiscal stimuli and increased government spending, with contributions that consider the measurement of the multiplier effect and its size. In the face of uncertainty over the sustainability of recent economic policies, further contributions to this volume discuss the merits of alternate means of debt reduction through decreased government spending or increased taxes. A final section examines how the short-term political forces driving fiscal policy might be balanced with aspects of the long-term planning governing monetary policy. A direct intervention in timely debates, Fiscal Policy after the Financial Crisis offers invaluable insights about various responses to the recent financial crisis.
We draw on a newly collected historical dataset of fiscal variables for a large panel of countries—to our knowledge, the most comprehensive database currently available—to gauge the degree of fiscal prudence or profligacy for each country over the past several decades. Specifically, our dataset consists of fiscal revenues, primary expenditures, the interest bill (and thus both the primary and the overall fiscal deficit), the government debt, and gross domestic product, for 55 countries for up to two hundred years. For the first time, a large cross country historical data set covers both fiscal stocks and flows. Using Bohn’s (1998) approach and other tests for fiscal sustainability, we document how the degree of prudence or profligacy varies significantly over time within individual countries. We find that such variation is driven in part by unexpected changes in potential economic growth and sovereign borrowing costs.