Efforts to maintain balanced budgets, driven in part by formal requirements, lead to substantial pro-cyclicality in states' capital investments, transfers to local governments, and spending in areas like education and transportation. Extensive reliance on relatively volatile revenue sources...

An attempt is made in this paper to examine the impacts of government spending on human capital on human development indicators like healthcare outcomes, education achievements and increase in national income in Namibia using time series data from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals a significant...

This study analyzes the effect of fiscal decentralization on health outcomes in China using a panel data set with nationwide county-level data. We find that counties in more fiscal decentralized provinces have lower infant mortality rates compared to those counties in which the provincial...

The United States faces challenging budgetary prospects, as do most other OECD countries. The federal budget deficit widened considerably during the recession, reaching about 10% of GDP in both 2009 and 2010, reflecting the operation of automatic stabilizers and the policy response to the...

The deteriorating fiscal position of municipalities across the United States raises the question which adjustment mechanisms municipalities have at their disposal and what their effects are. We utilize quasi-experimental variation in the year of property tax assessments in the state of...

The recession of 2007–2009 knocked the wind out of state government budgets, but revenues and spending have grown steadily in recent years. As revenues have risen, some governors have pursued reforms to reduce tax burdens on families and make their states more competitive. Other governors have...

Most countries discipline their public budget through a set of fiscal rules aiming at limiting public debt accumulation. Yet, apart from the direct effect on public finance outcomes, there is limited evidence on whether these policies affect broader socio-economic outcomes. This paper provides...

Most countries discipline their public budget through a set of fiscal rules aiming at limiting public debt accumulation. Yet, apart from the direct effect on public finance outcomes, there is limited evidence on whether these policies affect broader socio-economic outcomes. This paper provides...

By applying a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach this paper estimates the effects of fiscal policy shocks of different government sub-sectors on aggregate GDP in Germany. From a general government perspective, the results show that besides investment, it is particularly changes in...

In Ghana, West Africa, the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with the national election year. This paper analyses the intersection of pandemic-related fiscal interventions and the electoral calendar, analysing how this temporal confluence shaped the kind of mechanisms of redistribution...