Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks in the European Transition Economies

EU member countries are currently exposed to negative implications of the economic and financial crisis. In connection with this problem arises the question of an anti-cyclic role of an economic policy or more precisely the (regulatory) role of the government in the economy that seems to be the centre of discussions in the academic as well as economic policy sphere. The problem of a permanent deficiency of the general government budget stresses many “old” as well as “new” EU member countries. It significantly reduces an expansionary potential of the national fiscal policies. Because the economic crisis seems to be a very difficult problem due to its specific and complex features, it is necessary for the EU member countries to coordinate the process of the national stimulatory actions approving that would help the countries to avoid an undesired reallocation of resources outside the EU single market as well as the negative common competitive effects. In the paper we analyze the effects of fiscal policy shocks in the Czech republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak republic, Bulgaria and Romania in the period 2000-2008. Our objective is to estimate the effects of discretionary changes in fiscal policy (associated with an increase in government expenditures) as well as the role of automatic stabilizers (associated with an increase in tax revenues). To meet the objective we estimate vector autoregression (VAR) model. To check the robustness of the results we implement an identification scheme based on two approaches. The first, recursive approach, is based on the Cholesky decomposition of innovations that allows us to identify structural shocks hitting the model. The second approach, structural VAR approach, is based on applying long-run restrictions to the reduced-form VAR model. From both identified true models we compute impulse-response functions to estimate the responses of real output, inflation and short term interest rates to the government expenditure and tax revenue shocks.