Search results for "country size"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Government consumption volatility and the size of nations
2016
This paper analyzes the relation between government consumption volatility and country size. Using an unbalanced sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2010, it finds that smaller countries have more volatile government consumption. Moreover, while this relation is more negative for more volatile economies, there is also evidence that smaller countries have more volatile government consumption even controlling for the level of volatility in the economy.
Business cycle volatility and country zize :evidence for a sample of OECD countries
2008
The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between business cycle volatility and country size using quarterly data for a sample of OECD countries over 1960-2000. The results suggest very strongly that the relationship between country size and business cycle volatility is negative and statistically significant. This finding is very robust, suggesting that country size does matter, at least for the severity of cyclical fluctuations.
Tax Design in the OECD: A Test of the Hines-Summers Hypothesis
2011
This paper investigates the effects of economic size and trade openness on tax design in the OECD. Using data for 30 OECD countries over the 1965–2007 period, we test the recently proposed Hines-Summers [2009] Hypothesis, according to which the smaller the size and the greater the openness of the economy, the more it will rely on expenditure taxes and the less on income taxes. Our findings show that the Hines-Summers Hypothesis can claim broad, statistically significant, and robust empirical support in the OECD data sets we examined.
Can fiscal decentralization alleviate government consumption volatility?
2016
We analyse how fiscal decentralization affects the volatility of government consumption extending the existing literature that mainly deals with the effects of the former on government size. Using data for 97 developed and developing countries from 1971 to 2010, we find that a higher degree of fiscal decentralization leads to lower government consumption volatility. This result holds for the sub-sample of advanced economies, while it is not confirmed for those less-developed. This mechanism seems to work mainly through a lower volatility of the non-discretionary spending, which typically belongs to the central government’s policy. We also confirm existing findings according to which country…