This paper presents evidence of electoraly-motivated changes in the budget balance, public expenditures, composition of public expenditures and provincial revenues in Argentine provinces. The empirical study is made using panel data analysis for 22 provinces during the period 1985-2001. Unconditional results show that conditioning on the alignment of provincial and federal executives (same political party in power) there is evidence of systematic changes in fiscal policies around elections. The observed changes support the predictions of rational opportunistic models of PBC. In election years, total provincial expenditures increase in aligned provinces, without affecting the fiscal balance, because to the increased discretional transfers from the federal government supporting the provincial incumbent federal revenues. By contrast, deficit increases for unaligned provinces. In addition, expenditure shifts toward current spending and away from capital spending for unaligned provinces in electoral years.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Valeria Dowding).
Related research
Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: