The Sustainability Of Fiscal Policy

This paper assesses the cyclicality and sustainability of fiscal policy in Belize and applies a stochastic simulation model to determine the optimal set of fiscal rules. The empirical analysis shows that fiscal policy in Belize has been significantly procyclical and unsustainable much of the period since 1976. While the government’s recent commitment to maintain a primary surplus of at least 2 percent of GDP until 2021 is supporting debt reduction, stochastic simulations indicate that further improvement in the primary balance is necessary to reliably bring the debt-to-GDP ratio to a sustainable path. Given Belize’s history of large economic shocks, this paper proposes explicit fiscal rules designed for countercyclical policy and debt sustainability. It recommends integrating such rules into a well-designed fiscal responsibility law and establishing an independent fiscal council to improve accountability and transparency.

The health systems we enjoy today, and expected medical advances in the future, will be difficult to finance from public resources without major reforms. Public health spending in OECD countries has grown rapidly over most of the last half century. These spending increases have contributed to ...

This paper critically reviews recent work regarding the sustainability of public debt. It argues that Debt Sustainability Analyses (DSAs) should be more than mere mechanical simulation exercises. Instead, a DSA should be linked to some objective regarding the distribution of fiscal burdens and distortions over time (in the tradition of Barro’s 1979 tax smoothing objective). The paper discusses objective functions that yield simple and transparent fiscal policy rules.

Despite its beneficial aspects, public debt can be hazardous for macroeconomic performance should it reach unrepayable levels as a consequence of snowballing explosive trends. Failure to monitor the existing trend in public debt in order to detect such divergences from the stable path, and the lack of an adaptive public financial management can potentially culminate in a public debt crisis whose disruptive economic impacts can permeate all sectors of the economy very swiftly. However, public debt sustainability is a vague concept with no straightforward operational definitions. In addition, its multi-faceted nature is an impediment for the implementation of real-world appraisal of the fiscal posture from a stability viewpoint. As such, quantifying the public debt sustainability is essential for overhauling the fiscal policies so as to avoid a potential debt crisis stemming from malfunctioning fiscal policies. This book provides the reader with a practical and straightforward framework that outlines a tool for undertaking public debt sustainability analysis. In order to guide further empirical investigations, the discussion in this book is underpinned by a real-world application of the model which highlights the practical aspects of the tool with reference to time-varying empirical evidence from a developing country.

This book addresses the increasingly urgent question: How can governments be made more accountable for the quality of their environmental stewardship? It explores: Enhanced national State of the Environment reporting and integration of environmental outcomes in key national indicators. Mainstreaming environmental goals, targets, and risks by integrating them in fiscal policy and the annual budget—a government’s most important policy instrument. Promoting sustainability by progressively exposing and eliminating harmful tax and expenditure policies, putting a price on pollution, and providing environmental public goods. Civil society environmental monitoring. The book combines in-depth assessment of the latest climate/green budgeting literature and country practices with discussion of how to implement green fiscal policies. The framework is deliberately ambitious given the severity, scale, and urgency of climate change and biodiversity loss. The book will be of interest to ministry of finance, budget, and planning officials, to environment sector agencies, oversight institutions, international organizations, civil society organizations, and to academics and students in the fields of environmental studies, development studies, economics, public finance, and public policy.

We study empirically the reaction of fiscal policy to changes in the permanent and transitory components of GDP in a panel of countries. We find evidence that government spending tends to be counter-cyclical conditional on temporary shocks and pro-cyclical conditional on permanent shocks. We also find no evidence that developing countries are systematically different from developed ones in terms of fiscal policy. We present a theory featuring a fiscal reaction function to the output gap and a measure of debt sustainability. The fiscal impulse response to a permanent (temporary) shock to GDP is positive (negative) as the effect on debt sustainability (current output gap) dominates. The results are mostly sensitive to the relative weight of debt sustainability in the fiscal reaction function as well as to the extent of real rigidities in the economy.

This paper assesses sustainable fiscal behavior in an economy where wealth is derived predominantly from a non-renewable resource. It explores the issue in a simple dynamic framework that highlights the structural weaknesses in the underlying budgetary position, takes into account the rate of depletion of a country’s natural resource base, and examines the impact of changes in a country’s terms of trade. An alternative indicator of fiscal sustainability is derived, and the principal factors determining sustainability are identified. The results of the analysis are applied to Venezuela and Kuwait.

India's economy has grown rapidly since the beginning of the 1990s despite a large and growing fiscal deficit and rising public levels relative to output. This book explores whether India has found a way to reconcile sustained expansionary fiscal policies with relative macroeconomic stability.

Modernizing the framework for fiscal policy and public debt sustainability analysis (DSA) has become necessary, particularly in light of the recent crisis and rising sustainability concerns in some advanced economies. While recognizing the inherently challenging nature of such analysis, this paper highlights areas where improvements are needed and makes both general and specific proposals on how this could be achieved. It also proposes to move to a risk-based approach to DSAs for all market-access countries, where the depth and extent of analysis would be commensurate with concerns regarding sustainability, while a reasonable level of standardization would be maintained.