Suchergebnisse

The necessity of government participation in the economy, as well as the limits of such participation are the object of theoretical and empirical economic research. The debate concerning public revenue share in Gross Domestic Product has a long history. Another question that exists is as follows: is budget deficit or surplus able to maintain a balance between economic stability and social equity and which one (budget deficit or surplus) is going to induce higher real economic growth. The necessity of active participation of the government in the economy and the use of budget balance as a fiscal instrument for economic regulation is even more tangible. The economic growth in global, regional and national aspect over the last years has been slow. This fact presents a real challenge concerning the stability of the public budget. In the present research, the object of analysis is budget balance, and its subject – the effect of public budget deficit/ surplus on real economic growth. The main goal is to evaluate budget deficit/ surplus impact on real economic growth using econometric analysis and comparative analysis between Bulgaria and the other new Member States of the European Union (Cyprus, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Croatia, accepted in the EU during 2015.) as well as the Balkan States (Serbia, Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia). The purpose is to justify the necessity of balancing the public budget and of reducing budget deficit to the level ensuring sustainable economic growth.

Existing methodologies for estimating a government's structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of trade, asset prices and unbalanced growth. A key result is that the terms-of-trade boom, which began in the late 2000s, is associated with around 1% of GDP in tax revenues that may not be structural. Uncertainty surrounding cyclically-adjusted balance estimates is presented using fan charts.

Estimates of cyclically-adjusted budget balances, correcting actual government budget balances for business cycle fluctuations, are produced by many institutions, including the European Commission, the IMF and the OECD. This paper presents an alternative approach for the cyclical adjustment of budget balances. The approach is based on a disaggregated method for the calculation of the cyclical component of the budget balance. In this approach, the effects of changes in the structure of demand and national income on government revenue and expenditure are captured. Cases where the various macroeconomic bases are in different phases of the cycle or exhibit fluctuations of different magnitude are taken into account in this way. The computation of the cyclical components of these macroeconomic bases is based on the Hodrick-Prescott filter and takes into account the latest evidence presented in the literature about the properties of this filter. The paper also presents new estimates of the elasticities of individual budget items with respect to the relevant macroeconomic variables. The method is used within the ESCB for the estimation of cyclically adjusted budget balances of the EU countries

This paper examines the impact of the form of government—presidential or parliamentary—on fiscal outcomes in democratic systems. Based on data for democracies in 98 countries between 1970 and 2002, it shows that the gross domestic product ratio of the central government budget balance is higher in presidential than in parliamentary democracies. It also shows that this impact is not due to the fact that presidential systems are not subject to the "costs of coalition" that allegedly afflict parliamentary democracies: the coalition and status of the government are of no consequence for budget balances in either presidential or parliamentary systems. Presidential systems matter for budget balances because they generate relatively high incentives for governments to keep budgets under control. They do so because in presidential systems, unlike in parliamentary systems, voters are by design able to identify and punish those responsible for economic policies. Presidents, however, vary in their capacity to affect budget policies. This paper demonstrates that presidential systems in which presidents are constitutionally able to dominate the budget process or to effectively veto legislation tend to have higher budget balances than those in which the budget process is dominated by the legislature or the president is unable to exercise existing veto powers.