Michael Kuehlwein (Pomona College) Sansern Samalapa
Abstract
Some theory suggests that budget deficits and greater public spending will raise real interest rates and crowd-out private investment; other theory suggests there is no effect. We attempt to test this in the Thai economy between the years 1978 and 1994. We find that budget deficits did appear to raise real interest rates during our sample period. Our estimates also suggest that, holding the deficit constant, Thai government current and construction expenditure did not raise real interest rates and that Thai government equipment expenditure lowered them. We try to explain the last result with a framework similar to Barro's (1981) but expanded to include foreign trade and borrowing. Foreign borrowing alleviates the pressure on real interest rates to rise, and, under certain conditions, allows them to fall. We find support for this hypothesis from regression results that suggest that, during our sample period, Thai government equipment expenditure was heavily financed from abroad. The results imply that public investment programs in developing countries that do not boost budget deficits and obtain some foreign financing may not crowd-out private investment and could be a promising means of promoting capital formation.
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: ().
Related research
Keywords:
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.:
Cited by: (explanations, 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.)