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Abstract

Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal polices, 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 %u201Cstarving the Leviathan%u201D 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 UCLA Department of Economics in its series Levine's Bibliography with number 784828000000000465.

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Date of creation: 06 Oct 2005
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Handle: RePEc:cla:levrem:784828000000000465

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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-2005-10-15 (All new papers)
• NEP-CDM-2005-10-15 (Collective Decision-Making)
• NEP-FIN-2005-10-15 (Finance)
• NEP-MAC-2005-10-15 (Macroeconomics)
• NEP-PBE-2005-10-15 (Public Economics)

References

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