MACRO
La Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible, aprobada en 2015 por la ONU, constituye un ejemplo exitoso sobre cómo un consenso político internacional respecto a logros deseables en el medio/largo plazo (herederos de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio) se puede concretar en unos objetivos concretos y cuantificables. En concreto, se fijan 17 Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS, en adelante) que incluyen asuntos tan relevantes como la sostenibilidad ambiental, la reducción de la pobreza y las desigualdades o una mayor eficiencia energética y productiva. Este trabajo aspira a estudiar la contribución de la fiscalidad de la Unión Europea a la consecución de dichos objetivos en el periodo 2005-2017.
This study analyses the composition and main determinants of spending dynamics in selected euro area countries between 1999 and 2013. To assess the stance of public spending policies we use the indicators developed in Hauptmeier et al. (2011). Our results indicate that the overall expansionary expenditure stance in 1999-2009 was mainly driven by public consumption. Transfers and subsidies on the other hand were mostly expansionary after 2008 while public investment had boomed just before the crisis and turned restrictive during the crisis. The overall policy stance turned restrictive in 2010 and strongly so in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most consolidation efforts focussed on public investment and on public consumption and while transfers and subsidies were largely spared. Our econometric analysis, which covers the 2000-2013 period, shows a significantly pro-cyclical stance of public consumption which was driving overall spending dynamics. The degree of spending expansion tends to be negatively affected by the size of government debt and the presence of effective fiscal rules. On the other hand, EMU-related interest savings coincided with an expansionary expenditure stance. Revenue windfalls and shortfalls exerted a significant effect on government investment spending.
Public sector bureaucracies are key players in modern advanced economies, in particular for the smooth functioning of the roles assigned to the government sector, such as the provision and organization of welfare state services, and the implementation of the (economic) institutional framework, including as regards the tax code and the guarantees of legal certainty for economic agents. From this perspective, a proper functioning of bureaucratic bodies is crucial for potential growth. Thus, cross-country differences in the quality of bureaucracies can explain, to a large extent, differences in economic growth among them. The operation of self-interested bureaucracies, insofar as their objective function differs from the one of the benevolent social planner (government), can lead to regulatory capture, damaging efficiency and economic incentives, labor market misallocation, and inefficient fiscal policies. In this paper, first, we engage in a thorough review of the extant literature, framing the discussion of the main channels by means of a small-scale dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. Second, we provide an empirical exercise that illustrates the links between bureaucratic/institutional quality and economic growth. ; Las burocracias del sector público son actores clave en las economías avanzadas, como en el caso de los países de la Unión Europea, para el buen funcionamiento de los papeles asignados a los gobiernos (proporcionar servicios y prestaciones del Estado de Bienestar, infraestructuras públicas y diseño del marco jurídico y económico institucional). Desde esta perspectiva, el buen funcionamiento de la burocracia pública es crucial para el crecimiento potencial. Por lo tanto, las diferencias entre países en la calidad de las burocracias pueden explicar las diferencias en el crecimiento económico. En consecuencia, la existencia de "burocracias con intereses propios" puede llevar a políticas fiscales inadecuadas, a la captura regulatoria o al mal funcionamiento del mercado laboral, dañando los ...
Efficient use of public resources is clearly a relevant issue to be studied from several points of view. Among others, it accounts for a significant share of the total economy activity and it deals with non market oriented activities. In Spain, the regional level is particularly relevant due to the progressive decentralization during the 200s of key public policies constituting the welfare state (as education, health, etc.). Consequently,it increased notably their financing needs but affecting asymmetrically because of the important differences in their fiscal capacity. Moreover, they mostly share (15 of 17) a common financing system in which an efficient use of resources is assumed but not evaluated. Our results show that normally a few of the regions tend to be the top performers, but there no regions performing poorly in every aspect. It is also worth noting that no dramatic changes can be seen in terms both of expenditure and performance during the recent Great Recession.
We estimate the probability of public sector leadership – defined as Granger causality from public to private sector wages – in a pool of 18 OECD countries as a function of countries' institutional features. We find that public-private sector causality results are quite heterogeneous across countries. So, we investigate whether this is related to differences in labor and product market institutions, and notably wage-setting institutions, across countries. Government involvement in collective bargaining, bargaining centralization and collective bargaining systems with predominant regional levels' systems are positively correlated with the probability of finding public wage leadership. Among the factors that reduce its probability we can underline the impact of globalization and a level of collective bargaining closer to the company one.
In this paper we develop a comprehensive short-term fiscal forecasting system, useful for real-time monitoring of government's borrowing requirement in Spain, a country that has been at the center of the recent European sovereign debt crisis, not least because of sizeable failures to meet public deficit targets. The system is made of a suite of models, with different levels of disaggregation (bottom-up vs top-down; general government vs sub-sectors) suitable for the automatic processing of the large amount of monthly/quarterly fiscal data published nowadays by Spanish statistical authorities. Our tools are instrumental for ex-ante detection of risks to official projections, and thus can help in reducing the ex-post reputational costs of budgetary deviations. On the basis of our results, we discuss how official monitoring bodies could expand, on the one hand, their toolkit to evaluate regular adherence to targets (moving beyond a legalistic approach) and, on the other, their communication policies as regards sources of risks of (ex-ante) compliance with budgetary targets.
PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the possible interdependencies among fiscal, monetary and growth variables by applying multivariate Granger Causality and determining an ultimate "causality path" excluding redundant relationships based on a complex endogenous system for each country.Design/methodology/approachWe adopt a novel approach to test Granger Causality within the framework of Vector Autoregressive models. This approach enables us to expand the scope of relevant variables, which is typically limited to two or three, previously mentioned. Moreover, we employ graph-theoretic techniques for causal analysis, utilizing the PC algorithm (Colombo and Maathuis, 2014; Spirtes et al., 2000) to determine the optimal causal ordering among all statistically significant relationship.FindingsOur findings highlight the continued division between "core" and "peripheral" Euro area countries, with monetary policy variables playing a crucial role in the economic growth of "core" nations. Stable inflation contributes to sustained growth in these countries, while fiscal variables contribute to growth across most nations.Originality/valueThe literature concerning the relationship among different macroeconomic variables such as prices, output and monetary policy indicators such as interest rates and interest payments, may be incomplete or misguided due to the exclusion of relevant information because studies are mostly based on a bivariate or a trivariate framework dynamics. In this sense, one goal is the extension of the system, which may be crucial, because the omission of relevant variables may lead to biased results. Furthermore, we apply graph-theoretic methods for causal analysis by using the PC algorithm to determine the ultimate causal sequence among all possible ones and, finally, we aim to understand and disentangle the transmission process and the relationships among economic policies in a Euro area country-level analysis.
