No description available.

An analysis of Thai government expenditures demonstrates that they expanded rapidly between 1900 and 1969, due primarily to rising prices and the extension of government functions, particularly during the post-war period. In contrast, the war effect had little influence on the growth of expenditures. During the period under study, Thai government expenditures were devoted largely to general, social, and economic services, with emphasis on transportation and communication, defense, agriculture, and education. Current expenditures (for defense, education, etc.) represented a higher percentage of total government expenditures than did capital expenditures (for public construction, social services, etc.). In general, the case of Thailand indicates that levels of government expenditure were higher in conjunction with greater emphasis on economic and social development.

The objective of this dissertation is to test empirically whether fiscal policy mimicking exists in developing countries and whether such mimicking leads to policy harmonization. This is done by studying the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Region and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The dissertation uses panel data and applies the generalized method of moments (GMM) and the generalized spatial two-stage least squares (GS2SLS) methodologies to a spatial setting to test for the spatial interactions. The study also tests for evidence of spatial interaction in the assessment of government efficiency by voters in neighboring countries, where efficiency is measured using the price/quantity ratio of public goods provision. We find evidence of fiscal policy copycat behavior in both the SSA and SADC regions and mimicking is also present in some tax revenues as well as in expenditure levels. This leads us to conclude that there is some form of fiscal harmonization taking place in these developing countries. We also find evidence of spatial interaction in the assessment of governments’ efficiency in the provision of public goods. Overall, we conclude that there is evidence of some fiscal mimicking behavior as a developing world phenomenon.

The thesis deals with the 2011 social reform implemented by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic. Initially, the various reform steps are analyzed. Developments in the evolution of change are monitored since their introduction to 2015 and then the financial and social impacts of individual changes are examined. The primary goal of the social reform was to increase the efficiency of the public funds spent on the social benefits system and their overall reduction. The main output of the work is the realization that this goal was not fulfilled, on the contrary there was the depletion of funds in the net amount of CZK 10.77 billion. Research has also shown that individual changes have had a negative impact on the lives of the people concerned. In conclusion, the reform is monitored in the context of the necessity of its implementation and related to the previous large reforms that took place in the Czech Republic.

This study was an assessment of governmental expenditures for human resource programs on economic and social development in Jordan from 1948 to 1988. An assessment was made of the impact of governmental expenditures for education, health, and welfare on the growth of the economy as measured by gross national product (GNP) and the quality of life as measured by the physical quality of life index (PQLI). The major purpose of the investigation was to provide policy makers with an alternative way of assessing the influence of governmental expenditures on development.

Die vorliegende Dissertation beschäftigt sich modelltheoretisch mit drei Themenbereichen aus dem Feld der Bildungsforschung. Das erste Kapitel behandelt die Existenz von Studiengebühren. Bei der persönlichen Entscheidung für oder gegen ein Studium sind Studiengebühren ein Nachteil, vor allem, wenn dafür kein Angebot in Form von besseren Studienbedingungen existiert. Andererseits ist das Studium nicht nur eine finanzielle Entscheidung, sondern kann auch Nutzen in anderer Form wie Status oder Prestige bedeuten. Wenn der Status negativ von der Anzahl der Absolventen abhängt, könnte es von Vorteil sein, die Menge an Studenten künstlich durch Studiengebühren zu reduzieren. Es wird ein Modell präsentiert, in dem in einem statischen Gleichgewicht wohlhabendere und fähigere Studenten für höhere Studiengebühren stimmen, um die Absolventenzahl zu verknappen und den Status zu erhöhen. Das darauffolgende Kapitel enthält eine Erweiterung eines Signaling-Modells zur Notenvergabe. Das ursprüngliche Modell kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Noteninflation unausweichlich ist, da gute Noten der Schule keine Kosten verursachen. Es existiert aber in der Realität ein gegenläufiger Effekt: Noteninflation hat Einfluss auf die Reputation einer Schule und führt daher bei zukünftigen Absolventen zu einer Erwartungsanpassung der Arbeitgeber. Die Erweiterung des Modells zeigt, dass Noteninflation mit Reputation verringert oder sogar vermieden werden kann. Im letzten Kapitel wird ein Modell präsentiert, das den Einfluss eines separierenden Schulsystems und eines Gesamtschulsystems auf die akademische Leistung abbildet. Es wird zwischen einer Anfangsfähigkeit eines Schülers unterschieden, die hauptsächlich durch die Familienherkunft bestimmt wird, und der Lernfähigkeit eines Schülers. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass die Leistung schlechterer Schüler in der Gesamtschule steigen kann, selbst wenn es keine Synergieeffekte zwischen guten und schlechten Schülern gibt. Der Effekt entsteht, da die Gesamtschule einen Kompromiss im Anspruchsniveau finden muss, welcher höher ist als das Anspruchsniveau in der separierten, schlechteren Klasse. Wenn die schlechteren Schüler die größere Lernfähigkeit besitzen, erhöht sich in der Gesamtschule sogar die Durchschnittsleistung aller Schüler.

States merge local governments to achieve economies of scale. Little is known to which extent mergers of county-sized local governments reduce expenditures, and influence political outcomes. I use the synthetic control method to identify the effect of mergers of large local governments in Germany (districts) on public expenditures. In 2008, the German state of Saxony reduced the number of districts from 22 to 10. Average district population increased substantially from 113,000 to 290,000 inhabitants. I construct a synthetic counterfactual from states that did not merge districts for years. The results do neither show reductions in total expenditures, nor in expenditures for administration, education, and social care. There seems to be no scale effects in jurisdictions of more than 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, I find evidence that mergers decreased the number of candidates and voter turnout in district elections while vote shares for populist right-wing parties increased.

The financial crisis of 2007/8 has triggered a profound debate about public budget finance sustainability, ever-increasing government expenditures and the efficiency of fiscal policy measures. Given this context, the following dissertation provides four contributions that analyze the long-run growth of government spending throughout economic development, discuss potential effects of fiscal policy measures on output, and provide new insights into the assessment of debt sustainability for a variety of industrialized countries. Since the breakout of the European debt crisis in 2009/2010, there has been a revival of interest in the long-term growth of government expenditures. In this context, the relationship between the size of the public sector and economic growth - often referred to as Wagner's law - has been in the focus of numerous studies, especially with regard to public policy and fiscal sustainability. Using historical data from the mid-19th century, the first chapter analyzes the validity of Wagner's law for five industrialized European countries and links the discussion to different stages of economic development. In line with Wagner's hypothesis, our findings show that the relationship between public spending and economic growth has weakened at an advanced stage of development. Furthermore, all countries under review support the notion that Wagner's law may have lost its economic relevance in recent decades. As a consequence of the 2007/8 financial crisis, there has been an increasing theoretical and empirical debate about the impact of fiscal policy measures on output. Accordingly, the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) approach to estimating the fiscal multipliers developed by Blanchard and Perotti (2002) has been applied widely in the literature in recent years. In the second chapter, we point out that the fiscal multipliers derived from this approach include the predicted future path of the policy instruments as well as their dynamic interaction. We analyze a data set from the US and document that these interactions are economically and statistically significant. In a counterfactual simulation, we report fiscal multipliers that abstract from these dynamic responses. Furthermore, we use our estimates to analyze the recent fiscal stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The third chapter contributes to the existing empirical literature on fiscal multipliers by applying a five-variable SVAR approach to a uniform data set for Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Besides studying the effects of expenditure and tax increases on output, we additionally analyze their dynamic effects on inflation and interest rates as well as the dynamic interaction of both policy instruments. By conducting counterfactual simulations, which abstract from the dynamic response of key macroeconomic variables to the initial fiscal shocks, we study the importance of these channels for the transmission of fiscal policy on output. Overall, the results demonstrate that the effects of fiscal shocks are limited and rather different across countries. Further, it is shown that the inflation and interest rate channel are insignificant for the transmission of fiscal policy. In the field of public finances, governmental budgetary policies are among the most controversial and disputed areas of political and scientific controversy. The sustainability of public debt is often analyzed by testing stationarity conditions of government's budget deficits. The fourth chapter shows that this test can be implemented more effectively by means of an asymmetric unit root test. We argue that this approach increases the power of the test and reduces the likelihood of drawing false inferences. We illustrate this in an application to 14 countries of the European Monetary Union as well as in a Monte Carlo simulation. Distinguishing between positive and negative changes in deficits, we find consistency with the intertemporal budget constraint for more countries, i.e. lower persistence of positive changes in some countries, compared to the earlier literature.