Suchergebnisse

Structural fiscal targeting (the practice of setting of medium-term targets for taxation, government borrowing, spending and regulation) has a rightful place in any sensible longer term economic strategy. But the merits of targeting depend crucially on how and where the targets are set. If the targets are very constraining and arbitrarily set as part of an ideological commitment to "small government", they can limit the scope for governments to achieve an optimal balance between efficiency and equity. Indeed they may advance neither efficiency nor equity. This is especially so in a country like Australia which starts with a relatively small government base and where the community has shown a willingness to accept a reasonable sacrifice of efficiency for the sake of other values. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the particular structural targets currently in vogue in Australia are consistent with good governance. The paper analyses the present medium term fiscal stance (section 2) and its implications for economic efficiency (section 3) and for equity (section 4). It then considers whether a policy shift might be desirable (section 5). It starts by attempting to define good governance (section 1).

In the past decade the Colombian Economic Authorities undertook a series of measures that reduced the structural fiscal deficit, decreased the Government currency mismatch and deepened the local fixed-rate public bond market. This paper presents some evid

This article presents a structural fiscal balance for the Costa Rican economy. The structural balance is an ex-post indicator of fiscal policy performance which attempts to contribute to the development of a fiscal rule. In order to derive this indicator the IMF's general methodology was applied to data from the Costa Rican Ministry of Finance. The elasticities of tax revenues and current expenditure to national output were estimated by means of a simple OLS model while potential output was estimated by means of the Hodrick-Prescott. The article's main conclusion is that the structural fiscal balance moves in the same direction as that of the output gap. ; En este artículo se desarrolla un balance fiscal estructural para la economía costarricense. Se propone utilizar un indicador alternativo ex-post de la política fiscal que contribuya a la formulación de una regla fiscal. Para este fin, se utilizó la metodología general del FMI con datos obtenidos del Ministerio de Hacienda de Costa Rica. Además, se desarrolló un modelo de MCO con el propósito de calcular las elasticidades de los ingresos tributarios y del gasto corriente con respecto a la producción nacional. El filtro Hodrick – Prescott fue utilizado para calcular el producto potencial. Se comprobó empíricamente que, para el caso costarricense, el balance fiscal estructural se comporta de la misma manera que la brecha entre el producto efectivo y el potencial.