Government Spending Effects in Low-income Countries

Wenyi Shen, Susan Yang and Luis-Felipe Zanna

No 2015/286, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Despite the voluminous literature on fiscal policy, very few papers focus on low-income countries (LICs). This paper develops a new-Keynesian small open economy model to show, analytically and through simulations, that some of the prevalent features of LICs—different types of financing including aid, the marginal efficiency of public investment, and the degree of home bias—play a key role in determining the effects of fiscal policy and related multipliers in these countries. External financing like aid increases the resource envelope of the economy, mitigating the private sector crowding out effects of government spending and pushing up the output multiplier. The same external financing, however, tends to appreciate the real exchange rate and as a result, traded output can respond quite negatively, reducing the overall output multiplier. Although capital scarcity implies high returns to public capital in LICs, declines in public investment efficiency can substantially dampen the output multiplier. Since LICs often import substantial amounts of goods, public investment may not be as effective in stimulating domestic production in the short run.

Keywords: WP; Fiscal Policy; Low-income Countries; Public Investment; Fiscal Multipliers; Small Open DSGE Models; Aid; output multiplier; traded output; aid financing; financing method; consumption multiplier; crowding in; government consumption shock; traded goods; government spending effect; spending increase; investment efficiency; financing source; Public investment spending; Government consumption; Debt financing; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2015-12-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=43506 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Government spending effects in low-income countries (2018)
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:imf:imfwpa:2015/286

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().