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This thesis comprises of four essays on fiscal policy and fiscal policy adjustment. The first of these essays, Chapter 2, reviews a wide range of literature about fiscal policy. This chapter also discusses the sudden stop and fiscal policy during sudden stops episodes. Chapter 3 constructs a simple dynamic deterministic model to study how the speed of adjustment to a sustainable level of debt affects economic welfare. The simulation results in Chapter 3 suggest that in order to bring the level of external debt to a sustainable level as required by foreign lenders, the small open economy will attempt to delay adjustment as long as possible. Chapter 4 uses a Structural Vector Autoregression Model to estimate government consumption multipliers for groups of countries. The empirical results suggest that: (i) The higher degree of financial openness, the larger the government consumption multiplier. (ii) The government consumption multiplier is significantly bigger in countries with higher levels of external debt. (iii) The higher the level of financial development, the smaller the government consumption multiplier. (iv) The government consumption multiplier in countries with fixed exchange rates seems to be bigger than in countries with a flexible exchange rate regime. Chapter 5 of this thesis analyses four case study countries including Greece, Latvia, Pakistan and Turkey. This chapter finds that fiscal policy choice varies across countries because there are many possible determinants for this. It will also be determined that all factors including the level of public debt, level of external debt and monetary policy, especially exchange rate regime, affects the fiscal policy choice of each country. Furthermore, Chapter 5 also points out that political economy can influence fiscal policy directly and indirectly.

This thesis consists of three essays concerned with endogenous fiscal policy and its interaction with political economy constraints. The first essay presented in Chapter 2 examines the cyclical behavior of endogenous government consumption over the business cycle absent a commitment mechanism in a neoclassical economy with Total Factor Productivity (TFP) shocks and investment shocks. Tax rates that finance public consumption are chosen in a time consistent way in a dynamic game between the government and a representative agent that values public goods in his utility. It is found that government consumption set without commitment behaves procyclical in response to the mentioned shocks. The government-consumption-output ratio is mildly procyclical or countercyclical depending on the selected calibration. Particularly, the elasticity of substitution between private and public goods plays an important role. The second essay showed in Chapter 3 extends the model studied in Chapter 2 adding agent heterogeneity in wealth and labor productivity. The aim of this study is to identify how policy outcomes are affected by inequality of households, particularly the median voter's choice of tax rates that finance public goods. For a standard RBC calibration to the U.S. economy the result is a strong procyclical comovement of public consumption with output, and a relatively weak procyclical comovement of the output share of public consumption with output, that becomes stronger with rising inequality. The politico-economic channel induces causality from output to lagged tax rates, therefore after a Hicks neutral productivity shock the median voter tries to delay the increase in the tax rate, such that the increment will take place just after the accumulation of more capital. In the case of equal agents the response is to decrease the tax rate in the first year after the shock. Additionally, the model predicts that the size of government consumption decreases with inequality. The last essay in Chapter 4 presents a stylized model of external sovereign debt that incorporates corruption in the form of rent-seeking groups by which the choice to cooperate or non-cooperate in providing public goods, in extracting rents and in issuing debt, is endogenized. More than one rent-seeking group originates a "tragedy of the commons" over fiscal resources that make the borrower economy to show collective fiscal impatience. External creditors envision that impatience and require higher interest rates for buying bonds, exacerbating the problem of high debt. The high level of interest rates decreases the wealth of the country and endangers its ability to repay the debt. We show that bailout plans, defined as temporary loans with lower than market level interest rates, are not effective in such economies.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar como a política fiscal brasileira respondeu às variações do ciclo econômico no período de 1997 a 2016. A partir do uso de dados trimestrais, busca-se entender se a política fiscal brasileira apresentou comportamento pró-cíclico, isto é, se atuou no sentido de reforçar os ciclos econômicos, se apresentou comportamento anti-cíclico, no qual as medidas de política fiscal são implementadas a fim de possibilitar um movimento fiscal na direção contrária aos ciclos, ou se foi tipicamente acíclica, sem possuir qualquer relação com o momento no qual a economia se encontrava. O estudo se dará analisando o superávit primário e enfatizando como certas variáveis macroeconômicas reagem a variações do hiato do produto. A análise se dará tanto do lado da despesa, com ênfase no gasto e também no consumo do governo, como também no que tange à receita. A análise pelo lado da receita é a grande contribuição deste trabalho para a literatura existente uma vez que os trabalhos já existentes para o caso brasileiro focam apenas no lado do gasto. Ainda no que diz respeito à receita, como a arrecadação total possui um comportamento tipicamente endógeno já amplamente discutido pela literatura existente, o foco se dará usando alíquotas efetivas médias de arrecadação tributária calculadas em estudos recentes. Os resultados indicam um comportamento pró-cíclico da política fiscal brasileira nos últimos vinte anos, tanto do lado da receita como da despesa, bem como uma inércia fiscal que ajuda a explicar o agravamento do problema da dívida pública e de solvência fiscal que o Estado brasileiro vem enfrentando recentemente. / The aim of this work is to analyze how the Brazilian fiscal policy responded to the variations of the business cycle within the period from 1997 to 2016. By using quarterly data, we seek to understand if the Brazilian fiscal policy presented a procyclical behavior, that is, if it acted so as to reinforce the business cycles, if it presented countercyclical behavior, in which the fiscal policy measures are implemented in order to allow a fiscal movement in the opposite direction of the cycles, or if it was typically acyclical bearing no relation to the moment in which the economy was subject. This study analyzes the primary surplus and emphasizes how certain macroeconomic variables react to the variations of the output gap. The analysis is conducted from the point of view of the expenditure, with emphasis on public spending and also in the government consumption, as well as the revenue. The analysis from the point of view of the revenue is the great contribution of this work to the existing literature as the already existing studies for the Brazilian case focus only on the point of view of the expenditure. Still regarding the revenue, as the total revenue has a typically endogenous behavior already largely discussed by the existing literature, the focus is on the average effective tax rates of the tax revenue calculated in recent studies. The results indicate a procyclical behavior of the Brazilian fiscal policy over the past twenty years, from both points of view: the revenue and also the expenditure, as well as a fiscal inertia which helps to explain the aggravation of the problem of the public debt and the fiscal solvency that the Brazilian State has been facing recently.

This study investigated the determinants of inflation in South Africa using quarterly data from 1970Q1 to 2015Q4. The study was motivated by recent trends in domestic inflation that has frequently been at the upper end of the target range of between 3% and 6% and the need to guide inflation related policy since 2008. These recent trends raised concerns regarding the effectiveness of the current monetary policy approach in responding to internal and external factors that are significant in determining domestic inflation. Using Error Correction Model (ECM) modelling techniques, empirical results revealed that inflation expectations, labour costs, government expenditure and import prices are positive determinants, while GDP and exchange rates are negative determinants of inflation. To achieve the macroeconomic policy objective of a stable and low inflation rate for South Africa, more emphasis should be placed on anchoring inflation expectations, which was found to be highly significant in determining inflation. / Economics / M. Com. (Economics)