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Abstract

Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal policies, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for less-than-benevolent government to appropriate rents. Voters have incentives similar to the "starving the Leviathan" classic argument, and demand more public goods or fewer taxes to prevent governments from appropriating rents when the economy is doing well. We test this argument against more traditional explanations based purely on borrowing constraints, with a reasonable amount of success.

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Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number 1556.

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Date of creation: 2005
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Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1556

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Find related papers by JEL classification:

• E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
• D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
• D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy-Making and Implementation

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

• NEP-ALL-2005-12-09 (All new papers)
• NEP-MAC-2005-12-09 (Macroeconomics)
• NEP-PBE-2005-12-09 (Public Economics)
• NEP-POL-2005-12-09 (Positive Political Economics)
• NEP-PUB-2005-12-09 (Public Finance)

References

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