Worldwide experience highlights public finance policies that promote economic growth while meeting the need for fundamental public goods. Macroeconomic stability is essential, as large budget ...deficits retard growth, followed by moderate levels of public spending - around one-third of GDP or less - especially when governance and public administration are weak; that in turn requires efficiency, particularly in areas such as infrastructure, health, education, and social protection; finally, lower income and payroll tax rates can spur investment and employment. The Eastern European and Central Asia countries pioneered flat income taxes without generally suffering revenue losses as a result, but they have not addressed the problem of high payroll taxes and still face many hurdles in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending and revenue generation.
This paper takes stock of what we have learned from the "Renaissance" in fiscal research in the ten years since the financial crisis. I first discuss the new innovations in methodology and various ...strengths and weaknesses of the main approaches to estimating fiscal multipliers. Reviewing the estimates, I come to the surprising conclusion that the bulk of the estimates for average spending and tax change multipliers lie in a fairly narrow range, 0.6 to 1 for spending multipliers and -2 to -3 for tax change multipliers. However, I identify economic circumstances in which multipliers lie outside those ranges. Finally, I review the debate on whether multipliers were higher for the 2009 Obama stimulus spending in the United States or for fiscal consolidations in Europe.
This lecture focuses on the costs of public debt when safe interest rates are low. I develop four main arguments. First, I show that the current US situation, in which safe interest rates are ...expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception. If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers, that is the issuance of debt without a later increase in taxes, may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost. Second, even in the absence of fiscal costs, public debt reduces capital accumulation, and may therefore have welfare costs. I show that welfare costs may be smaller than typically assumed. The reason is that the safe rate is the risk-adjusted rate of return to capital. If it is lower than the growth rate, it indicates that the risk-adjusted rate of return to capital is in fact low. The average risky rate however also plays a role. I show how both the average risky rate and the average safe rate determine welfare outcomes. Third, I look at the evidence on the average risky rate, i.e., the average marginal product of capital. While the measured rate of earnings has been and is still quite high, the evidence from asset markets suggests that the marginal product of capital may be lower, with the difference reflecting either mismeasurement of capital or rents. This matters for debt: the lower the marginal product, the lower the welfare cost of debt. Fourth, I discuss a number of arguments against high public debt, and in particular the existence of multiple equilibria where investors believe debt to be risky and, by requiring a risk premium, increase the fiscal burden and make debt effectively more risky. This is a very relevant argument, but it does not have straightforward implications for the appropriate level of debt. My purpose in the lecture is not to argue for more public debt, especially in the current political environment. It is to have a richer discussion of the costs of debt and of fiscal policy than is currently the case.
Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures their effect on the dynamics of the business ...cycle. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete-markets model of consumption and inequality with the new Keynesian model of nominal rigidities and business cycles, and that includes most of the main potential stabilizers in the U.S. data and the theoretical channels by which they may work. We find that the conventional argument that stabilizing disposable income will stabilize aggregate demand plays a negligible role in the dynamics of the business cycle, whereas tax-and-transfer programs that affect inequality and social insurance can have a larger effect on aggregate volatility. However, as currently designed, the set of stabilizers in place in the United States has had little effect on the volatility of aggregate output fluctuations or on their welfare costs despite stabilizing aggregate consumption. The stabilizers have a more important role when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound, and they affect welfare significantly through the provision of social insurance.
This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has ...been associated with lower growth than expected. The relation is particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters. The weaker relation in more recent years may in part reflect learning by forecasters and in part smaller multipliers than in the early years of the crisis. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article measures renewable energy firm-level pure innovation efficiency, green productivity, technical efficiency, scale efficiency and total investment efficiency from micro input–output ...factors using Banker, Charnes and Cooper’s (BCC) data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. Its main novelty is that it clearly explores the effective impacts of government subsidies and tax rebate policies on renewable energy firms’ investment efficiency using China’s renewable energy firm-level panel data. Our observational findings indicate that between 2001 and 2018, the aggregate degree of total investment performance from renewable energy firms rose steadily before declining. Renewable energy firms had larger ranges of total investment efficiency and size efficiency, and their levels of pure technological efficiency were both greater than 0.457%. At the 16% trust mark, current government subsidies and taxation rebates had dramatically positive effects on pure technological efficiency and total investment efficiency; additionally, government subsidies have a stronger positive impact on total investment efficiency and pure technical efficiency than taxation rebates. Furthermore, the ownership concentrations of renewable energy companies greatly encourage pure technological efficiency, size efficiency and total investment efficiency, and asset returns will significantly increase their average degree of total investment efficiency and pure technical efficiency.
How high can public debt rise without compromising fiscal solvency? We answer this question using a stochastic model of sovereign default in which risk-neutral investors lend to a government that ...displays 'fiscal fatigue', whereby its ability to increase primary balances cannot keep pace with rising debt. As a result, the government faces an endogenous debt limit beyond which debt cannot be rolled over. Using data for 23 advanced economies over the period 1970—2007, we find evidence of a fiscal reaction function with these features, and use it to compute 'fiscal space', defined as the difference between current debt ratios and the estimated debt limits.
This paper analyzes how bounded rationality affects monetary and fiscal policy via an empirically relevant enrichment of the New Keynesian model. It models agents’ partial myopia toward distant ...atypical events using a new microfounded “cognitive discounting” parameter. Compared to the rational model, (i) there is no forward guidance puzzle; (ii) the Taylor principle changes: with passive monetary policy but enough myopia equilibria are determinate and economies stable; (iii) the zero lower bound is much less costly; (iv) price-level targeting is not optimal; (v) fiscal stimulus is effective; (vi) the model is “neo-Fisherian” in the long run, Keynesian in the short run.
Governments around the world responded to the COVID19 crisis (CVC) by aggressively deploying fiscal policy to boost health expenditure, income transfers and increased welfare payments, as well as ...wage subsidies to firms to retain employees to minimize short term unemployment. A fiscal response was in principle both necessary and timely, but the nature of the responses adopted by governments differed markedly around the world. After describing the global macroeconomic impact of the CVC and its effect on budget deficits and public debt levels, this paper critically evaluates the global fiscal response with reference to comparable historical episodes. The analysis suggests some fiscal responses were too expansive and of the wrong form. The paper then highlights the future macroeconomic risks arising from the highly elevated public debt levels the CVC has caused, concluding that fiscal consolidation rather than further fiscal ‘stimulus’ will be needed to address the parlous fiscal legacy of the crisis.
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