Output Effects of Fiscal Consolidations: Does Spending Composition Matter?

This paper studies whether changes in the composition of public spending affect the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations. Based on a sample of 44 developing countries and 26 advanced economies during 1980-2019, results show that while fiscal consolidations tend to be on average, contractionary, the size of the output fall depends on the behavior of public investment vis-a-vis public consumption during the fiscal adjustment, with heterogeneous responses growing over time. When public investment is penalized relative to public consumption and thus, its share in public expenditures decreases, a 1 percent of GDP consolidation reduces output by 0.7 percent within three years of the fiscal shock. In contrast, safeguarding public investment from budget cuts vis-a-vis public consumption can neutralize the contractionary effects of fiscal adjustments on impact, and can even spur output growth over the medium term. The component of GDP that mostly drives the heterogeneity between both types of adjustments is private investment. The results hold up to a number of robust-ness tests, including alternative identification strategies of fiscal shocks. The findings have policy implications for the design of fiscal adjustment strategies to protect economic growth as countries recover from the coronavirus pandemic.consolidation reduces output by 0.7 percent within three years of the fiscal shock. In contrast, safeguarding public investment from budget cuts vis-a-vis public consumption can neutralize the contractionary effects of fiscal adjustments on impact, and can even spur output growth over the medium term. The component of GDP that mostly drives the heterogeneity between both types of adjustments is private investment. The results hold up to a number of robustness tests, including alternative identification strategies of fiscal shocks. The findings have policy implications for the design of fiscal adjustment strategies to protect economic growth as countries recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Are governments paying a price for austerity? Fiscal consolidations reduce government approval

What are the political effects of fiscal consolidations? Theoretical considerations suggest that consolidations should reduce the public’s support for their governments, but empirical studies have found surprisingly small effects on government support. However, most of these studies analyze electoral outcomes, which are separated from the consolidation by a multi-link causal chain. We argue that more direct measures of government support, such as executive approval, show much stronger negative effects of consolidation, since they are less affected by the strategic timing of consolidations or the political alternatives on offer. We analyze a time series cross-sectional dataset of executive approval in 14 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1978 to 2014, using the narrative approach to measure fiscal consolidations. We find that spending cuts decrease government approval, especially during economic downturns, but tax increases’ impact on approval remains minimal. Finally, left- and right-wing governments are equally likely to lose approval after implementing austerity.

Research Insights: Can the Design of Fiscal Rules Help to Protect Productive Public Investment from Budget Cuts?

Flexible fiscal rules include mechanisms to accommodate unexpected/exogenous shocks. In countries without fiscal rules, or with rigid rules (i.e., rules without flexible features), public investment falls sharply during fiscal consolidation episodesby as much as 10 percent on average. The negative impact of fiscal consolidations on public investment disappears in countries using flexible fiscal rules.

Fiscal Consolidation: Welfare Effects of the Adjustment Speed

This article studies the response of social welfare to fiscal consolidations, by focusing on a less debated characteristic of fiscal plans: the speed of deleveraging. A neoclassical overlapping generations model is calibrated to the German economy, and a sequence of reductions of the same size in the debt‑ to GDP ratio are simulated considering different adjustment periods. Welfare gains are found to be larger in slow, delayed fiscal consolidations, due to the presence of incomplete markets. It is also found that the aggregate welfare response depends on the distribution of wealth and the type of fiscal instrument used.

Fiscal austerity in emerging market economies

We build a small open economy RBC model with financial frictions to analyse spending and tax based fiscal consolidations in emerging market economies (EMEs). We show that if government spending is a substitute to private consumption in household utility, a spending based fiscal consolidation has an expansionary effect on output. In contrast, tax based consolidations are always contractionary irrespective of the strength of substitutability between government and private consumption. Our findings support the results in the World Economic Outlook (2010), USA: International Monetary Fund, that tax based consolidation measures are more costly (in terms of GDP losses) than spending based consolidations. We calibrate the model to India and calculate the fiscal multipliers associated with spending and tax based fiscal consolidations. Our paper identifies new mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of fiscal reforms and their implications for successful fiscal consolidations.