Suchergebnisse

It is well known by now that government spending has typically been procyclical in developing economies but acyclical or countercyclical in industrial countries. Little, if any, is known, however, about the cyclical behavior of tax rates (as opposed to tax revenues, which are endogenous to the business cycle and, hence, cannot shed light on the cyclicality of tax policy). We build a novel dataset on tax rates for 62 countries for the period 1960-2013 that comprises corporate income, personal income, and value-added tax rates. We find that tax policy is acyclical in industrial countries but mostly pro cyclical in developing countries.

El efecto "flypaper" es un enigma ampliamente documentado que se refiere al hecho de que los gobiernos sub-nacionales poseen una propensión al gasto de transferencias no condicionales que es mayor que la propensión al gasto de los ingresos privados. Basándonos en enfoques de la literatura previa que racionalizan este enigma a partir de la existencia de costos asociados con la recaudacion impositiva, desarrollamos un modelo simple de política fiscal óptima con impuestos distorsionantes que genera dos implicancias novedosas y testeables: (i) debería existir una asociación positiva entre el grado del efecto "flypaper" y el nivel de la tasa impositiva; y (ii) el efecto "flypaper" debería ser mayor cuanto menor sea la elasticidad de sustitución entre el gasto público y privado y, de hecho, debería desaparecer para altos grados de sustitución. Mostramos que estas hipótesis se cumplen tanto para las provincias argentinas como para los estados brasileños. ; The flypaper effect is a widely-documented puzzle whereby the propensity of subnational governmental units to spend out of unconditional transfers is higher than the propensity to spend out of private income. Building on previous insights in the literature that rationalize this puzzle using costly taxation, we develop a simple optimal fiscal policymodel with distortionary taxation that generates two novel and testable implications: (i) there should be a positive association between the degree of the flypaper effect and the level of the tax rate, and (ii) the flypaper effect should be larger the lower the elasticity of substitution between private and public spending and, in fact, should vanish for very high degrees of substitution. We show that these hypotheses hold for argentinean provinces and brazilian states. ; Facultad de Ciencias Económicas