Why is Fiscal Policy often Procyclical?

Alberto Alesina and Guido Tabellini

No 1556, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Many countries, especially developing ones, follow procyclical fiscal policies, namely spending goes up (taxes go down) in booms and spending goes down (taxes go up) in recessions. We provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for less-than-benevolent government to appropriate rents. Voters have incentives similar to the "starving the Leviathan" classic argument, and demand more public goods or fewer taxes to prevent governments from appropriating rents when the economy is doing well. We test this argument against more traditional explanations based purely on borrowing constraints, with a reasonable amount of success.

JEL-codes: H30 H60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac, nep-pbe, nep-pol and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (148)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp1556.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Why Is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical? (2008)
Working Paper: Why is fiscal policy often procyclical? (2005)
Working Paper: Why is fiscal policy often procyclical? (2005)
Working Paper: Why Is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical? (2005)
Working Paper: Why is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical? (2005)
Working Paper: Why is Fiscal Policy Often Procyclical?
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1556

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().