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标题：Evaluating the dynamics of fiscal policy in Spain: patterns of interdependence and consistency of public expenditure and revenues (182 KB)
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作者：Francisco de Castro ; José Manuel González-Páramo y Pablo Hernández de Cos
期刊名称：Documentos de Trabajo / Banco de España
印刷版ISSN：0213-2710
电子版ISSN：1579-8666
出版年度：2001
卷号：1
出版社：Banco de España
摘要：Two issues are addressed in this paper. First, we attempt to ascertain whether the current fiscal policy in Spain satisfies the intertemporal borrowing constraint. For this purpose, we apply the traditional empirical tests of sustainability proposed in the literature, that pay special attention to integration orders of deficit and debt processes and the existence of cointegration relationships between revenues and expenditures. Under this approach, a sustainable fiscal policy would indicate that if fiscal variables follow the pattern of the past in the future, no problems in marketing public debt are expected to arise. Our results show that a structural break seems to have taken place gradually in the Spanish budget performance, which allows to verify the intertemporal borrowing constraint in a “strong sense”. Second, given the limitations of the previous sustainability analysis, the fact that the change to strong sustainability is not fully confirmed for a large sample period and that, even if this were the case, the Stability and Growth Pact for the EMU countries sets explicit ceilings to public finance that might require additional consolidation efforts in Spain, we consider the issue of which is the most efficient strategy to achieve permanent reductions in fiscal deficits. Thus, we analyse empirically the possible interdependence between government expenditure and revenues. We examine this issue by performing the standard Granger causality tests. We find that there is a bias towards deficit in public sector's size and that public expenditure causes revenues in the short and long term, whereas revenues only cause expenditures in the long term. These results imply that fiscal consolidation could be achieved with a reduction in the size of the public sector and that the most adequate strategy of fiscal consolidation should consist on the reduction of structural public expenditure