The Economic and Fiscal Impacts of Immigrant Populations on Nebraska and Omaha: Evidence from the 2015-2019 American Community Survey

A report on the economic and fiscal impacts of immigrant populations in Nebraska and Omaha.

AN INSIGHT INTO POTENTIAL FISCAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE GREAT LOCKDOWN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SMALL STATES

The Great Lockdown has caused severe economic distractions to the majority of world countries, and de-globalization trends have started to increase. Globalization was to an extent beneficial for smaller economies, and it was one of the factors contributing to the rise in the number of countries around the world during the last few decades. According to the perceived larger openness and vulnerability of smaller states, it is thus expected that those countries are hit much harder by the economic contraction, as their outputs are much more volatile in relation to the economic cycles. In this context, the paper intends to investigate the exposure of European states to the current lockdown, where the focus is particularly on assessing the fiscal impacts of the lockdown. The main research question is whether there are any differences regarding the fiscal functions of government between smaller and larger states. This is addressed through the cross-national comparative investigation based on data for 44 European countries; and we specifically assess how fiscal activities of government differentiate among smaller and larger states. The results of the study suggest that the effect of the size of the state does not affect the consumption spending of government, but the size variable matters for the transfer expenditures. This piece of research would like to add to the development of the discipline of small state studies, in particular to the issue of their vulnerability and changing global economic environment.

Local Government Fiscal Early Warning Surveys: Lessons From COVID-19

Yang (2020) recently argued for enhanced evidence–based decision making during sudden and widespread economic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but he lamented the difficulty of acquiring such data in a timely manner. One strategy is to implement an early warning survey system. This article describes Colorado’s experience with a survey the state administered to local government officials shortly after the governor’s stay-at-home order. The state used the survey to inform its fiscal response policies. We describe the advantages and challenges of using surveys as a statewide, rapid information collection strategy as well as offer evidence that the survey yielded relatively accurate data about local fiscal impacts. We also provide an empirical analysis of the survey, employing the Heckman correction technique to account for selection bias, to illustrate how the survey responses can improve state decision making.

Fiscal Impacts of Demographic Transition in Pakistan

This study has examined the fiscal impacts of the demographic transition. Declining fertility rate and increasing life expectancy rate are expected to cause ageing in Pakistan. The population projections of United Nation’s World Population Prospects were used, for projecting the labour force, which uses different scenarios to project population namely low variant, medium variant and high variant scenario. The study found that projected labour force is expected to decline under the medium variant scenario. The study examined the impact of expected decline in labour force on output growth of Pakistan using growth accounting technique, and found that under medium variant scenario, Pakistan is expected to face a loss of 4% of GDP at the end of this century. On the expenditure side, this study attempted to measure the impact of demographic transition on pension expenditures. Due to the increase in the proportion of the dependent population pension expenditures are expected to rise from 1.2% of GDP in 2015 to 3.5% of GDP by the end of the century. Due to the increase in old-age dependency ratio and hike in pension expenditures of Pakistan pay-as-you-go pension system is expected to become fiscally unsustainable as fewer workers would be bearing the burden of aged population. This fact advocates transition from pay-as-you-go pension system to fully funded pension system.

Spatial Patterns in Fiscal Impacts of Environmental Taxation in the EU

There are several reasons for environmental taxation implementation. Besides its environmental impact, the main reason for such taxation is its fiscal impact, particularly in generating revenues of public budgets. The main goal of this paper is to observe possible spatial patterns in fiscal impacts of environmental taxation in the EU countries, and to depict the groups of countries with the same (or similar) fiscal impact of these instruments on public budget revenues, including environmental and economic characteristics. Two methods of cluster analysis are used, Ward linkage and K-nearest neighbors (spatial) cluster analysis to observe potential geographical links or implication of fiscal impact. The study is performed for the years 2008 and 2017. Based on the results, we can say that in the year 2008, the EU countries were divided into “the west” and “the east”, with some exceptions. The western countries were characterized by high environmental tax revenues, the eastern countries by low environmental tax revenues. For 2017, the situation is different. The border between old and new EU member states is not so abrupt and clear. The results show higher diversification between EU countries concerning the fiscal impacts of environmental taxation.