Debt Deficit And Economic Performance

This text argues that in many jurisdictions free market advocates have resorted to pubic sector downsizing and privatization as a means of alleviating problems of unemployment and slow economic growth, and that, as a consequence, the strategy of reducing public deficits, balancing budgets and achieving surpluses has become widely accepted as the only road to prosperity.

Starting point of this book is the observation that an increase in public debt must be accompanied by a rise in the primary surplus of the government to guarantee sustainability of public debt. The book first elaborates on that principle from a theoretical point of view and then tests whether empirical evidence for that rule can be found. Additional tests are implemented to gain further evidence on sustainability of public debt. In order to allow for time varying coefficients penalized spline estimations are performed. The theoretical chapters present endogenous growth models and assume that the primary surplus rises as public debt increases so that sustainability of public debt is given. Implications of public deficits and debt are studied assuming full employment and for unemployment. The conclusion summarizes the findings and compares the results of the different models. Finally, policy implications are given showing how governments should deal with high public debt to GDP ratios.

At the time in which this book was first published in 1992, there was a major concern with the macro-economic implications of fiscal imbalance. As the European economies moved closer to monetary union, and Germany grappled with the fiscal pressures of unification, deficits in the United States exceeded $300 billion. In this volume the authors address this issue, using both historical case-studies and cross-national comparisons. This book will be of interest to students of economics.

Public debt has become a severe problem for a great many economies. While the effects of tax policies on the allocation of resources are readily derived, the mechanisms that make public deficits and debt influence the economy are not so easily understood. This book elaborates on the effects of public debt starting from the intertemporal budget constraint of the government. It is shown under which conditions a government can stick to the intertemporal budget constraint and then, demonstrated how public debt affects the growth process and welfare in market economies. The effects are derived for models with complete labor markets as well as taking into account labor market imperfections. The focus in this book is on fiscal policy issues, but it also deals with monetary policy aspects. The theoretical analysis is complemented with empirical time series analyses on debt sustainability and with panel studies dealing with the relationship between public debt and economic growth.

For dozens of developing countries, the financial upheavals of the 1980s have set back economic development by a decade or more. Poverty in those countries has intensified as they struggle under the burden of an enormous external debt. In 1988, more than six years after the onset of the crisis, almost all the debtor countries were still unable to borrow in the international capital markets on normal terms. Moreover, the world financial system has been disrupted by the prospect of widespread defaults on those debts. Because of the urgency of the present crisis, and because similar crises have recurred intermittently for at least 175 years, it is important to understand the fundamental features of the international macroeconomy and global financial markets that have contributed to this repeated instability. This project on developing country debt, undertaken by the National Bureau of Economic Research, provides a detailed analysis of the ongoing developing country debt crisis. The project focuses on the middle-income developing countries, particularly those in Latin America and East Asia, although many lessons of the study should apply as well to other, poorer debtor countries. The project analyzes the crisis from two perspectives, that of the international financial system as a whole (volume 1) and that of individual debtor countries (volumes 2 and 3). This second volume contains lengthy and detailed case studies of four Latin American nations—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico—providing a wealth of comparative data and new statistics on the general economic development of each nation. The authors explore the various factors that contributed to the debt crisis in each country and analyze how the crisis was managed once it had taken hold. Trenchant economic analyses are enchanced by assessments of the stark political realities behind the policy choices facing each nation.

This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by responding to prospective economic conditions. Using this new dataset, our estimates suggest fiscal consolidation has contractionary effects on private domestic demand and GDP. By contrast, estimates based on conventional measures of the fiscal policy stance used in the literature support the expansionary fiscal contractions hypothesis but appear to be biased toward overstating expansionary effects.