The global financial crisis has lead to a renewed interest in discretionary fiscal stimulus. Advocates of discretionary measures emphasize that government spending can stimulate additional private spending the so-called Keynesian multiplier effect. Thus, we investigate whether the discretionary...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...

The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of fiscal policies and PFM reforms in 7 countries in the Western Balkans and 12 countries in the CIS, including major macroeconomic and poverty trends, fiscal policy, the size and role of the public sector, public expenditure management and its...

This paper provides an overview of public expenditures on education and healthcare in Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and some other countries of the former Soviet Union before and during the global financial crisis. Before the crisis, the governments of these countries...

The paper deals with the impact of the global financial crisis on public service delivery - mainly education and healthcare - in Belarus. The pre-crisis period of 2003-2008 was the most prosperous in recent history. These trends resulted in a pretty good fiscal performance. Nevertheless, the...

This paper explores the effects that the global financial crisis of 2008 - 2010 had on the funding and performance of the healthcare and education sectors in the Russian Federation (RF). Both education and healthcare expenditures increased in terms of total general government (GG) spending...

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957-1979 and 1983-2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier sample. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited...

In this paper we test whether a reallocation of government budget items can enhance long-term GDP growth in a set of European countries. We apply modern panel data techniques to the period 1970-2006, and we use three alternative dependent variables in a growth regression: economic growth, total...

This paper analyses the effects in terms of size and volatility of government revenue and spending on growth in OECD and EU countries. The results of the paper suggest that both variables are detrimental to growth. In particular, looking more closely at the effect of each component of government...

The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macroeconomic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We...