Fiscal policy remains a crucial and powerful strategy to improve the welfare of citizens. During the last three decades, Albania has faced enormous social-economic challenges, raising the necessity ...for an adequate fiscal policy under the current economic situation. The correlation between fiscal policy and economic growth is a highly debated topic in literature reviews, as some of the fiscal tools do not influence in the same direction on economic growth. The purpose of the article is to see the influence of Automatic Stabilizers (AS) on the Economic Growth of Albania during the period 1999-2022. Most of the topics have been focused on the influence of active fiscal policy on economic growth despite this an unclear gap exists about the influence of the automatic fiscal policy, especially in Albania reality. The secondary data of the Ministry of Finance and INSTAT institutions about the variables and the factors that influence them like the tax system, tax revenues, and public expenditures are analyzed for this purpose. The conclusions reveal the necessity to improve especially the formula of the tax system according to the challenges of the economy. For almost three decades, the data of Automatic Stabilizers (AS) have been included in the multiple linear regression equation using the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) technique. The empirical result shows a narrow positive impact range of Automatic Stabilizers on Economic Growth. The change in the tax system and events such as the earthquake on November 9th, 2019, and the Covid-19 pandemic seem to have had a huge impact on this relationship. As Automatic Stabilizers have to do with vulnerable groups (social assistance is part of AS), some actions should be undertaken focusing on the improvement of the tax system, according to optimal management of expenditures. Applying the best practices to increase the revenues of vulnerable groups is necessary to cope better with the increasing actual rate of inflation.
Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy BLANCHARD, OLIVIER; DELL'ARICCIA, GIOVANNI; MAURO, PAOLO
Journal of money, credit and banking,
September 2010, Volume:
42, Issue:
s1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The great moderation lulled macroeconomists and policymakers alike in the belief that we knew how to conduct macroeconomic policy. The crisis clearly forces us to question that assessment. In this ...paper, we review the main elements of the precrisis consensus, identify where we were wrong and what tenets of the precrisis framework still hold, and take a tentative first pass at the contours of a new macroeconomic policy framework.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Abstract Oates, (1972) argues that local governments cannot use conventional policies to stabilize economies, due to fiscal spillovers and beggar‐thy‐neighbor policies. Hayek's theory implies it is ...efficient for a central government to devolve decision‐making authority to local governments that have informational advantages. This paper tests the different theoretical implications by examining a natural experiment caused by the income‐tax‐sharing reform in China. Our analysis reveals that local government size does have a stabilization effect, but vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) substantially weakens this stabilizing effect; lack of local information is the key factor leading to this influence of VFI.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
This article presents a basic Kaleckian model, enriched by the simultaneous addition of an Harrodian investment function and an autonomous expenditure component that grows at an exogenous rate. The ...model shows that the usual short-run properties (wage-led growth) are only transient, since the long-run growth rate converges towards that of autonomous expenditures. However, the impact on the level of variables (output, capital stock, labour, etc.) is permanent. The model also provides a conditional solution to the 'second' Harrod knife-edge problem: the destabilising behaviour of firms (as they adjust their investment decisions to the discrepancy between the actual and the normal rates of capacity utilisation) is now required to achieve the normal rate of capacity utilisation.
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BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract This paper provides a novel dataset of time-varying measures on the degree of countercyclicality of fiscal policies for advanced and developing economies between 1980 and 2021. The use of ...time-varying measures of fiscal stabilization, with special attention to potential endogeneity issues, overcomes the major limitation of previous studies and allows the analysis to account for both country-specific as well as global factors. The paper also examines the key determinants of countercyclicality of fiscal policy with a focus on factors as severe crises, informality, financial development and governance. Empirical results show that (i) fiscal policy tends to be more countercyclical during severe crises than typical recessions, especially for advanced economies; (ii) fiscal countercyclicality has increased over time for many economies over the last two decades; (iii) discretionary and automatic countercyclicality are both strong in advanced economies but acyclical (at times procyclical) in low-income countries; (iv) fiscal countercyclicality operates primarily through the expenditure channel, particularly for social benefits; and (v) better financial development, larger government size and stronger institutional quality are associated with larger countercyclical effects of fiscal policy. Our results are robust to various specifications and endogeneity checks.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
In light of the current low‐interest‐rate environment, we reconsider the merits of strict money growth targeting (MGT) relative to conventional inflation targeting (IT) and to price level targeting ...(PLT). We evaluate these policies in terms of social welfare through the lens of a New Keynesian model and accounting for a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. Although MGT makes monetary policy vulnerable to money demand shocks, MGT contributes to achieving price level stationarity and significantly reduces the incidence and severity of the ZLB relative to both IT and PLT. Furthermore, MGT lessens the need for fiscal expansions to supplement monetary policy in fighting recessions.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Using data from 29 European countries over 2002Q1–2019Q4, we estimate automatic stabilizers using various techniques, and show that the use of simple measures of government size as proxies is based ...on assumptions that are unrealistic and potentially misleading. Relaxing these assumptions allows us to construct measures of automatic stabilizers which are based on revenue and expenditure elasticities that are estimated directly using the regression-based approach and allowed to vary across countries. We demonstrate that higher automatic stabilizers are associated with lower output volatility, and the relationship is statistically significant and remarkably robust. At the same time, however, the “stabilization benefit” of automatic stabilizers is shown to have varied considerably across countries and over time.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
We derive a novel measure of household income stabilization and analyze how reforms of tax-benefit systems in the period 2007–2014 have affected the workings of automatic stabilizers in the EU-27. ...Our results reveal that the heterogeneity in automatic stabilizers across EU countries has become slightly smaller over the period under consideration. With a few exceptions, automatic stabilizers could operate freely in the early phase of the financial and economic crisis, but were constrained in several EU countries by subsequent fiscal consolidation measures. A comparison of our estimates of automatic stabilizers inherent in tax-benefit systems with macro measures such as changes in cyclically adjusted budget balances reveals that micro-based estimates provide more precise information about the degree of household income stabilization.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
•Stabilizing structural balance, GDP, and inflation are important goals for government.•Fiscal stabilization rule is generated from loss function stabilizing different goals.•A fiscal stabilization ...rule gives the scope of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy.•The magnitudes of fiscal support needed differ depending on the state of the economy.•The fiscal support can be given discretionarily or through automatic stabilizers.
The optimal fiscal stabilization rule presented in this paper is derived from a loss function where the government is assumed to keep the structural balance close to its target level and simultaneously stabilize the GDP and inflation gaps. The rule yields the size of the discretionary stabilization measures needed, in addition to automatic stabilizers, to be able to stabilize the business cycle, without compromising the sustainability of public finances. Using this policy rule and a first-order Taylor expansion of the fiscal balance, we decompose the automatic stabilizers and the discretionary fiscal policy conditional on business cycle conditions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
In this paper, we empirically explore the output-volatility reducing impact of automatic stabilizers and look in detail at their policy implications for selected EMU member states comprising Austria, ...Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain for the period 1995–2017. Overall, the results suggest that automatic stabilizers deliver a statistically significant, but fairly weak, counter-effect on output volatility in the short run. More specifically, output-volatility responses to automatic stabilizers by a reduction between −0.012 and −0.097 percentage points depending on the proxy measure used for automatic stabilizers. However, the automatic stabilizing impact from taxes and government spending is statistically insignificant in the long run. The results point to two main policy implications: i) automatic stabilizers are an important fiscal mechanism just for the short-run output stabilization, but their output-volatility offsetting role and power are largely subject to proxy measures used for automatic stabilizers; ii) no matter what proxy measures are used, automatic stabilizers largely produce a weak stabilizing performance in dampening short-term output volatility. So, from a macroeconomic policy standpoint, it can be safely claimed that automatic stabilizers can just be an integral part of discretionary fiscal policy rather than being an alternative to it.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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