Revisiting the Evidence on the Cyclicality of Fiscal Policy across the World

Carneiro, Francisco G. ; Garrido, Leonardo

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: fiscal policy;    pro-cyclical fiscal policy;    business cycles;   

RP-ID  :  108904

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

A large and growing literature hasargued that industrialized and developing countries behavevery differently in relation to their fiscal policy stancesover the business cycle. In this paper, the authors providenew evidence on the cyclicality of fiscal policy acrossindustrialized and developing countries. The authors sampleincludes 180 countries, of which 134 are developingcountries and 46 are high income countries over the period1980-2012. The authors follow the methodology of Frankel etal. (2013) but at the same time introduce three innovationsto the empirical approach. This paper is organized asfollows : After Introduction, Section two discusses issuesassociated with the choice of filter to smooth the proxyvariable for fiscal cyclicality while Section threeestimates our own Graduating Class under different filteringmethods and a country-specific approach to split the sampleinto two sub-periods. Section four presents an analysis ofhow the countries in our sample behave over the businesscycle. Section five discusses our findings on the empiricaldeterminants of fiscal cyclicality while Section sixexplores endogeneity issues. Section 7 presents concludingremarks confirming earlier findings in the literature on thecausal link between institutional quality and a lesspro-cyclical fiscal stance and suggesting policy directionsthat could be useful to countries interested instrengthening their fiscal positions and becoming betterequipped to adopt counter-cyclical fiscal policies