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Fiscal Foresight and Information Flows
News - or foresight - about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example of foresight, simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non-fundamental equilibria. Econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes; biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes. Both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized information flows. Different methods for extracting or hypothesizing the information flows are discussed and shown to be alternative techniques for resolving a non-uniqueness problem endemic to moving average representations.
Fiscal Limits, External Debt, and Fiscal Policy in Developing Countries
This paper studies fiscal policy effects in developing countries with external debt and sovereign default risks. State-dependent distributions of fiscal limits are simulated based on macroeconomic uncertainty and fiscal policy specifications. The analysis shows that expected future revenue plays an important role in the low fiscal limits of developing countries, relative to those of developed countries. External debt carries additional risks since large devaluation of the real exchange rate can suddenly raise default probabilities. Consistent with majority views, fiscal consolidations are counterproductive in the short and medium runs. When an economy approaches its fiscal limits, government spending can be less expansionary than in a low-debt state. As more revenue is required to service debt in a high-debt state, higher tax rates raise the economic cost of increasing consumption, reducing the fiscal multiplier.
Harnessing Resource Wealth for Inclusive Growth in Fragile States
Like other fragile sub-Saharan African countries, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are seeking to harness their natural resource potential in the context of ambitious development strategies. This study investigates options for scaling up public investment and expanding social safety nets in a general equilibrium setting. First, it assesses the macro-fiscal implications of alternative fiscal rules for public investment, and, second, it explicitly accounts for redistribution through direct cash transfers. Results show that a sustainable non-resource deficit target is robust to the high uncertainty of resources output and prices, while delivering growth benefits through higher public investment. The scaling-up magnitudes, however, depend on the size of projected resource revenue and absorptive capacity. Adding a social transfer raises private consumption, suggesting that a fraction of the resource revenue could be used to expand safety nets.
Investing Volatile Oil Revenues in Capital-Scarce Economies
Natural resource revenues are an increasingly important financing source for public investment in many developing economies. Investing volatile resource revenues, however, may subject an economy to macroeconomic instability. This paper applies to Angola the fiscal framework developed in Berg et al. (forthcoming) that incorporates investment inefficiency and absorptive capacity constraints, often encountered in developing countries. The sustainable investing approach, which combines a stable fiscal regime with external savings, can convert resource wealth to development gains while maintaining economic stability. Stochastic simulations demonstrate how the framework can be used to inform allocations between capital spending and external savings when facing uncertain oil revenues. An overly aggressive investment scaling-up path could result in insufficient fiscal buffers when faced with negative oil price shocks. Consequently, investment progress can be interrupted, driving up the capital depreciation rate, undermining economic stability, and lowering the growth benefits of public investment.
The Effects of Government Spending Under Limited Capital Mobility
This paper studies the effects of government spending under limited international capital mobility, as featured by most developing countries. While external financing of government debt mitigates the crowding-out effect, it generates real appreciation, which contracts traded output and lowers the fiscal multiplier in the short run. The decline of the multiplier is larger when facing debt-elastic country risk premia. Also, government spending is more expansionary with more home bias in government purchases, more sectoral rigidities, and a less flexible exchange rate. Whether the twin-deficit hypothesis holds depends crucially on the extent to which government deficits are financed externally.
Government Spending Effects in Low-income Countries
Despite the voluminous literature on fiscal policy, very few papers focus on low-income countries (LICs). This paper develops a new-Keynesian small open economy model to show, analytically and through simulations, that some of the prevalent features of LICs—different types of financing including aid, the marginal efficiency of public investment, and the degree of home bias—play a key role in determining the effects of fiscal policy and related multipliers in these countries. External financing like aid increases the resource envelope of the economy, mitigating the private sector crowding out effects of government spending and pushing up the output multiplier. The same external financing, however, tends to appreciate the real exchange rate and as a result, traded output can respond quite negatively, reducing the overall output multiplier. Although capital scarcity implies high returns to public capital in LICs, declines in public investment efficiency can substantially dampen the output multiplier. Since LICs often import substantial amounts of goods, public investment may not be as effective in stimulating domestic production in the short run.
The Design of Fiscal Adjustment Strategies in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland
Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland face the serious challenge of adjusting not only to lower Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) transfers because of the global economic crisis, but also to a potential further decline over the medium term. This paper assesses options for the design of the needed fiscal consolidation. The choice among these options should be driven by (i) the impact on growth and (ii) the specificities of each country. Overall, a focus on government consumption cuts appears to minimize the negative impact on growth, and would be appropriate given the relatively large size of the public sector in each country.
The Macroeconomic Effects of Natural Resource Extraction
To investigate the effects on Papua New Guinea’s economy of substantial liquified natural gas revenues arriving in 2015, we employ a model to examine the macroeconomic effects of a scalingup of natural resource windfall revenues and the implications for a variety of policy responses. The model is a multi-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, and features components that allow for a detailed study of the effects of both fiscal and monetary policy in response to a positive shock to the mineral resource value of a country. The model contains tradable, non-tradable, and mining sectors, as well as an independent central bank and fiscal authority. We calibrate the model to ...
Public Investment in Resource-Abundant Developing Countries
Natural resource revenues provide a valuable source to finance public investment in developing countries, which frequently face borrowing constraints and tax revenue mobilization problems. This paper develops a dynamic stochastic small open economy model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of investing natural resource revenues, making explicit the role of pervasive features in these countries including public investment inefficiency, absorptive capacity constraints, Dutch disease, and financing needs to sustain capital. Revenue exhaustibility raises medium-term issues of how to sustain capital built during a windfall, while revenue volatility raises short-term concerns about macroeconomic instability. Using the model, country applications show how combining public investment with a resource fund---a sustainable investing approach---can help address the macroeconomic problems associated with both exhaustibility and volatility. The applications also demonstrate how the model can be used to determine the appropriate magnitude of the investment scaling-up (accounting for the financing needs to sustain capital) and the adequate size of a stabilization fund (buffer).
Debt Sustainability, Public Investment, and Natural Resources in Developing Countries
This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open economy. It has two types of households, including poor households with no access to financial markets, and features traded and nontraded sectors as well as a natural resource sector. Public capital enters production technologies, while public investment is subject to inefficiencies and absorptive capacity constraints. The government has access to different types of debt (concessional, domestic and externa...
