Conditional Political Budget Cycles

Jakob Svensson and Min Shi

No 3352, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This Paper uses a large new panel data set to examine the relationship between elections and fiscal policy. We find clear evidence of political business cycles in macroeconomic policy: spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We also show that there are large systematic differences between developed and developing countries in the size and composition of the electoral policy cycles. We propose a moral hazard model of electoral competition to explain these differences. In the model, the sizes of the electoral budget cycles depend on the rents of remaining in power and the share of informed voters in the electorate. Using suitable proxies, we find that these institutional features explain a large part of the difference in policy cycles between developed and developing countries.

Keywords: Political budget cycles; Dynamic panel estimation; Developing countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 E62 P16 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

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