Fiscal policy for inclusive growth in Asia

This paper discusses how fiscal policy can help foster more inclusive growth in developing Asia. On average, government expenditures in developing Asia are higher, as a share of gross domestic product, than those in Latin America and the Caribbean. Relative to Latin America, developing Asia spends more on social benefits, but less on education and health. While general government revenues have risen since 2000, they are still not sufficient to fully fund targeted transfer programs and provide adequate in-kind benefits to the population. Against this background, this paper discusses priorities for policy reforms as countries in the region seek more inclusiveness and confront the effects of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The paper finds that eliminating inefficiencies in health, education, and public investment, for example, would generate the equivalent of 3 percent of gross domestic product. Savings from curtailing subsidies for fossil fuels would also generate resources for expanding redistributive spending. Reallocating health spending toward primary care, and education spending toward primary and secondary education, would help lead to more equitable growth. There is also scope to raise spending on social benefits and better target them to the poor.

Fiscal policies in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: are spending or revenue measures more effective?

We examine the effectiveness of different fiscal policies in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH). For this purpose, we use a structural macroeconomic model for the FBiH. In this model, GDP in the Federation is influenced by world demand and by domestic demand in the Federation. Domestic demand comprises consumption of private households, public consumption, and gross fixed capital formation. Employment depends positively on GDP and negatively on the tax wedge, i.e., the net wage plus social security contribution rates (including the unemployment insurance), and the personal income tax rate in the Federation. The latter allows the analysis of the impact of changes in social security contribution rates or in the income tax rate in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The following Federation-specific policy instruments are implemented in the model for the FBiH: Pension funds contribution rate in FBiH; contribution rate for health insurance in FBiH; contribution rate for the unemployment insurance in FBiH; benefits from social security; direct tax rates (income tax rate, corporate tax rate); public consumption in FBiH. Our results show that policy measures that reduce the tax wedge on labour income are highly effective in stimulating employment. Due to the large elasticity of imports with respect to demand, pure demand-side measures have little impact on real variables, indicating that a small open economy like the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has only little scope for influencing macroeconomic developments with pure demand management policies. Our results confirm earlier theoretical and empirical studies showing that the labour market can best be influenced positively by reducing the tax wedge. The multipliers of income tax reductions are larger and oscillate more than the effects of the other fiscal policy measures.

United Kingdom: health system review 2022

The separate governments in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have been in charge of planning and executing health care services since devolution in the late 1990s. Residents of the UK have access to a National Health Service (NHS) based on clinical need, not financial capacity. Contrarily, free access to social care services is means-tested and subject to a variety of eligibility requirements depending on the United Kingdom country. In comparison to the majority of other high-income nations, the UK has significantly lower levels of physicians and nurses, hospital beds, and diagnostic tools. Due to these deficiencies, the nation has minimal capacity to absorb sudden shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, they have caused an increase in the number of people on waiting lists for elective care, with over 6 million people in England alone in 2022. In the past, the UK's health spending has seen periods of both continuous expansion and austerity. Nevertheless, over the past ten years, total health spending has grown, reaching just over 10% of GDP in 2019. Around 80% of all health spending is public money, which is a significant share and has been stable over the past 20 years. As a result, UK people have little out-of-pocket spending and high levels of protection from the financial effects of illness. To enable real integration amongst health care providers, a number of obstacles still exist in all four countries, including disconnected health information technology systems, duplicate governance structures, and a dearth of strategic planning. Although efforts to encourage such integration through cross-sectoral partnerships have advanced in England, Scotland, and Wales in recent years, Northern Ireland remains the only United Kingdom component county where the NHS and social care are completely organisationally linked.

Fiscal Policy in the Context of Post-First Wave COVID-19 Economic Recovery: An Applied Study in Quebec

We examine the effects of fiscal policy on the Quebec territory using data from Q1-1981 to Q1-2020. To do so, we estimate VAR models and extract government spending shocks according to the sign restriction method proposed by Uhlig (2005). The impulse responses of real GDP, household consumption, private non-residential investment, and the household confidence index to a temporary and positive government spending shock are all significantly positive in the short run. We find high multipliers for total government spending shocks-they are above 2 in the short run, while government investment spending is above 3.5 and shows greater persistence. The possible consequences of the pandemic and the stimulus package on Quebec's debt trajectory complete the analysis. Lastly, government investment spending is the best way to get the economy going and even lower the debt ratio to meet the goals for 2026.

Wagner’s Law vs. Keynesian Hypothesis: Dynamic Impacts

This study analyzes the dynamics between public expenditure and economic growth in Peru for 1980Q1–2021Q4. We used quarterly time series of real GDP, public consumption expenditure, public expenditure, and the share of public expenditure to output. The variables were transformed into natural logarithms, wherein only the logarithm of public expenditure to output ratio is stationary and the others are non-stationary I1. The study of stationary time series assesses whether Wagner’s law, the Keynesian hypothesis, the feedback hypothesis, or the neutrality hypothesis is valid for the Peruvian case according to Granger causality. We found cointegration between real GDP and public expenditure, and public consumption expenditure and real GDP. Estimating error correction and autoregressive distributed lag models, we concluded that Wagner’s law and the Keynesian hypothesis are valid in the Peruvian case, expressed as dynamic processes that allow us to obtain short-run and long-run impacts, permitting the mutual sustainability of economic growth and public expenditure.

PUBLIC SPENDING AS A NEW DETERMINATE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL AND GREEN ECONOMIC RECOVERY: POLICY PERSPECTIVE ANALYSIS IN THE POST-COVID ERA

Green economy talks about combing final mechanisms that have ecological and macroeconomic system gains. Likewise, this research piece examined the effects of increased spending on fiscal policies and tightening fiscal policies concerning greening the economic activity as the globe reclaims itself from the COVID-19 in China. Analysis was done applying the China longitudinal data for the period 2008–2018. We utilized the ordinary least square as well as the quantile regression equation to meticulously approximate the influences of increased fiscal spending policies in addition to tightening fiscal policies has on greening the economic system acts as the countries reclaim themselves from the pandemic via a formulated green performance indicator of China nations. The findings indicate a rather exciting pattern by saying a percentage growth in fiscal policy led to nearly 6.5% growth, that is, less than 0.5 growth in the minimum carbon dioxide polluting vaporous from energy suppliers, such as natural gas, and a 0.2% less than 0.01 cuts in the midway carbon dioxide polluting liquefied energy suppliers, that is, hydrocarbon byproducts and a nonsignificant expansion of 0.2%, more significant than 0.5 in the entire case scenario coming from polluting dense energy suppliers, that is, from coal byproduct sources. At the same time, a 1% expansion in fiscal policy reduces cumulative carbon dioxide pollution to 0.2%, less than 0.05%. On this score, the presence of the environmental hypothesis was authenticated in all scenarios analyzed. Furthermore, the causality test indicated a dual movement causative correlation between fiscal policy and carbon dioxide pollution and one-way movement concerning the fiscal policy to energy use. The findings demonstrated that China witnessed a rising switch to green advancement in China;their Green Economic Efficiency increased steadily.

The regional (re)allocation of migrants during the Great Lockdown in Italy.

This paper presents first-hand evidence of the impact of Covid-19 on the re-allocation of migrants. I use monthly data on the migrants in reception centres and on daily arrivals in Italy during the period from October 2017 to October 2020, combined with information on Covid-19 cases across Italian regions. I employ a difference-in-differences design, finding that the presence of migrants decreased approximately 7% points more in regions highly exposed to the pandemic as compared to those less affected by Covid-19. In practice, migrants in second-line reception centres are reduced by approximately 381 units when considering a region less affected by the pandemic, and by around 2150 units in regions severely hit by the Covid-19 outbreak. Finally, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that in more affected regions, such an unusual reallocation of migrants implies potential savings in the range of 60-94 million euros, corresponding to about a 30-90% reduction in spending on migrant, refugee, and asylum seekers in these regions, whereas the reduction is of roughly 3-6% in less exposed areas. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40888-022-00262-y.

Income inequality and population health: a political-economic research agenda.

There is more than 30 years of research on relationships between income inequality and population health. In this article, we propose a research agenda with five recommendations for future research to refine existing knowledge and examine new questions. First, we recommend that future research prioritise analyses with broader time horizons, exploring multiple temporal aspects of the relationship. Second, we recommend expanding research on the effect of public expenditures on the inequality-health relationship. Third, we introduce a new area of inquiry focused on interactions between social mobility, income inequality and population health. Fourth, we argue the need to examine new perspectives on 21st century capitalism, specifically the population health impacts of inequality in income from capital (especially housing), in contrast to inequality in income from labour. Finally, we propose that this research broaden beyond all-cause mortality, to cause-specific mortality, avoidable mortality and subcategories thereof. We believe that such a research agenda is important for policy to respond to the changes following the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19, neoliberalism and health systems in 30 European countries: relationship to deceases

Background: The study was motivated by the need to understand the high number of deaths caused by COVID-19 in the global pandemic declared since December 2019, and how it impacted differently in European countries. The hypothesis was that less investment in the public health system, the number of doctors per inhabitant and the number of hospital beds available to the population led to a higher number of deaths after the arrival of COVID-19 in each country studied. The objective was to analyze the relationship between the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the global pandemic declared since December 2019 and health policies and investment in European countries.

MACROECONOMIC IMPACTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC IN THE PERIOD OF 2020-2021

This article provides a comprehensive summary of selected macroeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic, including an assessment of certain implemented fiscal and monetary policies, using data from 2019 (to compare the development of the economic situation during the COVID-19 pandemic with the period before the onset of the pandemic), 2020 and 2021 on a monthly or quarterly basis. Particular attention is paid to monetary policy effects, which, unlike fiscal policy, the Mundell-Fleming model considers effective in a small open economy with a freely floating exchange rate. The article also investigates the volume of fiscal measures taken to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic effects, the restrictive measures introduced to Czech households and firms as well as labour market developments during the period of 2019-2021, including quantification of the aggregate labour productivity index. The conclusions of the article are that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, macroeconomic indicators in the Czech Republic acted in accordance with the established partial hypotheses of the Mundell-Fleming model and in accordance with the hypothesis of the modified Phillips curve. Possible causes of the significant increase in inflation since September 2021 include 2020 nominal public and private sector salary growth, which showed faster growth than aggregate labour productivity, and the highly expansionary fiscal policy that characterized the 2021 pre-election period.