Essays on post-crisis fiscal policy

Abstract

This thesis comprises of four essays on fiscal policy and fiscal policy adjustment. The first of these essays, Chapter 2, reviews a wide range of literature about fiscal policy. This chapter also discusses the sudden stop and fiscal policy during sudden stops episodes. Chapter 3 constructs a simple dynamic deterministic model to study how the speed of adjustment to a sustainable level of debt affects economic welfare. The simulation results in Chapter 3 suggest that in order to bring the level of external debt to a sustainable level as required by foreign lenders, the small open economy will attempt to delay adjustment as long as possible. Chapter 4 uses a Structural Vector Autoregression Model to estimate government consumption multipliers for groups of countries. The empirical results suggest that: (i) The higher degree of financial openness, the larger the government consumption multiplier. (ii) The government consumption multiplier is significantly bigger in countries with higher levels of external debt. (iii) The higher the level of financial development, the smaller the government consumption multiplier. (iv) The government consumption multiplier in countries with fixed exchange rates seems to be bigger than in countries with a flexible exchange rate regime. Chapter 5 of this thesis analyses four case study countries including Greece, Latvia, Pakistan and Turkey. This chapter finds that fiscal policy choice varies across countries because there are many possible determinants for this. It will also be determined that all factors including the level of public debt, level of external debt and monetary policy, especially exchange rate regime, affects the fiscal policy choice of each country. Furthermore, Chapter 5 also points out that political economy can influence fiscal policy directly and indirectly.