Presidential Election, Checks and Balances, and Allocation of Public Expenditures in Taiwan

Yuan-Hong Ho and Chiung-Ju Huang ()
Additional contact information
Yuan-Hong Ho: Department of Public Finance, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Chiung-Ju Huang: Department of Public Finance, Feng Chia University, Taiwan

Journal of Economics and Management, 2013, vol. 9, issue 1, 31-53

Abstract: Few studies on political budget cycles have directly tested the public budget against changes in the composition of public spending. Meanwhile, previous studies implicitly assume that the executive has full discretionary power over fiscal policy, neglecting the role of the legislature in providing checks and balances. This study goes beyond traditional political budget cycle models and sheds light on a case study for Taiwan over the 1967-2008 period. Our empirical results show that social welfare expenditure is a favored strategy often employed by Taiwan's government in order to enhance the prospects of re-election. However, we find no evidence that election year spending shifts away from capital expenditures towards more visible current expenditures. The results also show that the effective checks and balances of the legislature have no significant influence over Taiwan's political budget cycles. Our conjecture is that Taiwan either as no legislative veto player or there is low compliance with the law during our study period.

Keywords: political budget cycles; public expenditures composition; veto player; compliance with law; political constraints index; checks and balances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 E62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.jem.org.tw/content/pdf/Vol.9No.1/03.pdf (application/pdf)
http://www.jem.org.tw/content/abstract/Vol.9No.1/English/03.htm (text/html)

Related works:
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:jec:journl:v:9:y:2013:i:1:p:31-53

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Management is currently edited by Cathy W. S. Chen and Shih-Wen Hu

More articles in Journal of Economics and Management from College of Business, Feng Chia University, Taiwan Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Yi-Ju Su ().