The article considers debt management practices by Russian regions and municipalities, within a framework set by federal budgetary legislation and practices of state-controlled banks. Key drivers of regional and municipal debt policy are analyzed, and Russian regions are stratified by their debt policy. Current recession is likely to produce higher level of regional debt and changes in its structure, lowering reliance on market funding and decreasing variations in pursued debt policy.
This chapter examines the large net-of-interest deficits in the U.S. federal budget that have marked the administration of Ronald Reagan. It explains the fiscal and monetary actions observed during the Reagan administration as reflecting the optimal decisions of government policymakers. The discussion is based on an equation whose validity is granted by all competing theories of macroeconomics: the intertemporal government budget constraint. The chapter first considers the government budget balance and the optimal tax smoothing model of Robert Barro before analyzing monetary and fiscal policy during the Reagan years: a string of large annual net-of-interest government deficits accompanied by a monetary policy stance that has been tight, especially before February 1985, and even more so before August 1982. Indicators of tight monetary policy are high real interest rates on government debt and pretax yields that exceed the rate of economic growth.
Optimal Public Debt Management and Liquidity Provision
