Search results for "Macroeconomic"
showing 10 items of 503 documents
Exploring Countercyclical Fiscal Policy in Local Government: Moving Beyond an Aggregated Approach
2014
There is a renewed interest in the fiscal health of local governments in the United States, which is being driven in part by academic research, professional organizations, and the economy. This renewed interest also includes how local governments use their cash reserves for countercyclical fiscal policy, which is a stream of research that has received minimal attention in the literature. We respond in this article by exploring how 97 North Carolina counties used their cash reserves from 2005 to 2012, which includes the great recession of 2008 and 2009. Our findings provide some evidence of countercyclical fiscal policy in local government when exploring the use of cash reserves from an aggr…
On distributing quarterly national growth among regions
2008
In many countries a very important fraction of public expenditure is managed by regional authorities. However, in a world where economic life has quickened and become more turbulent, subnational institutions rarely have a timely regional macroeconomic picture at their disposal. The authors propose a guide to a method for estimating quarterly accounts of regions from the national quarterly and annual regional accounts, by the use of a temporal structure which eliminates possible spurious jumps. The robustness of the process and suggested practicalities are tested, and the proposal is also shown to produce better estimates than other uniregional methods often used in this framework.
Ethiopia's Growth Acceleration and How to Sustain It—insights from a Cross-Country Regression Model
2015
Ethiopia has experienced a growth acceleration over the past decade on the back of an economic strategy emphasizing public infrastructure investment and supported by heterodox macro-financial policies. To analyze the country’s growth performance during 2000–13, the paper employs a neoclassical cross-country System Generalized Method of Moments regression model. The analysis finds that accelerated growth was driven by public infrastructure investment and restrained government consumption, and supported by a conducive external environment. Macroeconomic challenges arising from declining private credit, real currency overvaluation, and relatively high inflation held back some growth. The model…
INTERNATIONAL AND INTERTEMPORAL COMPARISONS OF REAL PRODUCT IN OECD COUNTRIES A GROWTH SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS
1997
This paper provides two new data sets for comparisons of real income in OECD countries. The first set provides adjusted real series for GDP and its components from 1960 to 1993 based on OECD 1990 purchasing power parities. The second set uses OECD PPP of different benchmark years, and interpolates these applying national price indices. Comparisons between both alternatives, Penn World Tahle Mark 5 (PWT 5) and its new version (PWT 5.6), in terms of economic growth and convergence, reveal some remarkable differences. Moreover, there are wider differences concerning the relative countries' position in GDP per capita ranking. Estimations of convergence equations based on OECD data yield a bette…
The effects of budget deficit on national saving in the OECD
2000
Abstract In this paper, we estimate a structural VAR using a panel of OECD countries, which includes national saving and budget deficit, both as the ratio to GDP, to test the Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. In this framework, we separate saving and deficit movements into two types of shocks, associated with structural parameters of these economies. Our results suggest that Ricardian Equivalence did not work in our sample of OECD countries, since private saving compensated only a small fraction budget deficit. This supports the interpretation that the large budget deficits have been a very important factor behind the significant increase in real interest rates in the eighties and early nin…
El patrón oro y el euro. Una reflexión a partir de la lectura de A Tract on Monetary Reform
2017
This paper makes a comparison between the gold standard and the euro through a study of Keynes’s views on the need to manage the macroeconomic situation of an industrial economy. The essay centers on Keynes’s first relevant economic work of the post World War I years, A Tract on Monetary Reform, analyzing its theoretical and practical content. The situation of monetary instability and the choice of exchange regime (to return or not to the gold standard, with the parity prior to the war) were the factors that attracted Keynes’s attention in those years. Similarities between the gold standard and the present euro system bestow a certain interest on Keynes’s ideas and on the economic discussio…
On the Link Between Volatility and Growth
2011
A model of growth with endogenous innovation and distortionary taxes is presented. Since innovation is the only source of volatility, any variable that influences innovation directly affects volatility and growth. This joint endogeneity is illustrated by working out the effects through which economies with different tax levels differ in their volatility and growth process. We obtain analytical measures of macro volatility based on cyclical output and on output growth rates for plausible parametric restrictions. This analysis implies that controls for taxes should be included in the standard growth-volatility regressions. Our estimates show that the conventional Ramey-Ramey coefficient is af…
The Stabilizing Role of Government Size
2007
This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model can generate a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of output. However, in the model, we find that the stabilizing effect is only due to a composition effect and it is not present when we look at the volatility of private output. Given that empirically we also observe a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of consumption, we modify the model by i…
Do Fiscal Rules Constrain Fiscal Policy in Romania?
2020
At both macroeconomic and national level, in recent decades, European tax policies have shown a particular interest in addressing the spectrum of risk issues in terms of maturing the business environment and the lack of sustainable development of the economy. In Romania there has been a significant increase in public debt, which is increasingly threatening fiscal sustainability. This is due to fiscal rules that restrict the applicability of fiscal policy to balancing the national economy. However, fiscal policy did not act in the direction of economic recovery during the crisis that started in the last quarter of 2008, which had a negative impact on the Romanian business environment. Object…
Technology spillover and TFP growth: A spatial Durbin model
2016
Beginning with a model in which technological progress is reflected by product variety, we provide a structural approach to estimate technology spillovers allowing for spatial interdependencies. To this end, we first present a theoretical model of TFP growth by decomposing TFP into quality and variety components. We address the quality component by introducing a country׳s distance to the technological frontier. Quality is assumed to be a negative function of the technological gap of country i with respect to its own technological frontier. This technological threshold is defined as the geometric means of knowledge levels in all countries. We deal with the variety component by using R&D expe…