 Macroeconomic risk and the (de)stabilising role of government sizeFabrizio Carmignani (), Emilio Colombo and Patrizio Tirelli European Journal of Political Economy, 2011, vol. 27, issue 4, 781-790 Abstract: Is government size the desirable response to macroeconomic risk, or it is the consequence of distorted political incentives with adverse effects on macroeconomic volatility? This paper reconsiders the mutual interdependence between government size and growth volatility in a large sample of countries within a system of simultaneous equations. We find that higher volatility is associated with larger government size and vice versa. Thus emphasis on government size as a mean capable, per se, of reducing macroeconomic risk is ill-conceived. We also identify a set of institutional limits to government discretion that also have beneficial effects on volatility. These include domestic political institutions, de facto central bank independence and a stable nominal exchange rate regime. Keywords: Output volatility; Government expenditure; Trade openness; Financial openness; Political institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:27:y:2011:i:4:p:781-790 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2011.04.002 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier |
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