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Essays on Fiscal Policy and Productivity Growth
Ambriško, Róbert ; Kejak, Michal (advisor) ; Lipińska, Anna (referee) ; Hollmayr, Josef (referee)
The unifying theme of this dissertation is economic growth in a broad sense. On one hand, economic growth is influenced by productivity growth that has economic consequences for converging economies, which gradually catchup to those that are more advanced. On the other hand, economic growth is influenced by fiscal policy, more specifically by government decisions about taxes and government expenditure. This dissertation consists of three separate chapters. In the first chapter, I focus on the Balassa-Samuelson (henceforth B-S) effect in the context of the convergence of the Czech Republic to the Euro Area. The B-S effect implies that highly productive countries have higher inflation and appreciating real exchange rates because of larger productivity growth differentials between tradable and nontradable sectors relative to advanced economies. The B-S effect may pose a threat to converging European countries that would like to adopt the Euro because of the limits imposed on inflation and nominal exchange rate movements by the Maastricht criteria. Thus, the main goal of this study is to determine whether the B-S effect is a relevant issue for the Czech Republic in complying with selected Maastricht criteria before adopting the Euro. For this purpose, I build and estimate a two-sector DSGE model of a small open...
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Assessing the Fiscal Sustainability of the Czech Republic
Ambriško, Róbert ; Dingová, Vilma ; Dvořák, Michal ; Hájková, Dana ; Hromádková, Eva ; Kulhavá, Kamila ; Štiková, Radka
We present a model of public finance for the Czech Republic that addresses the main sources of risks to long-term fiscal sustainability: ageing-related expenditures and revenues, and the corresponding evolution of government debt. The baseline model is based on recent demographic projections issued by the Czech Statistical Office that forecast a shrinking share of the working-age population. Along with regulations and microeconomic incentives embedded in the tax and expenditure systems, demographic developments will affect economic growth and government expenditure and revenues in the long run. Population ageing is found to have a significant impact on future government expenditure via spending on old-age pensions and health care, where the cost profiles are modelled to reflect technological progress in the treatment of ageing-related illnesses. The analysis shows that under the current policy settings, a compound demographic effect will cause the primary government balance to turn negative at the beginning of the 2030s. The growing primary deficits, along with interest payments, which react to debt dynamics, will lead to a rapid escalation of government debt. While the outcome of the model is dependent on the specific settings of macroeconomic trends and policy variables, our wide range of sensitivity analyses show that without a policy response, even the most optimistic population scenario delivers an unsustainable path for public finances.
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Assessing the Impact of Fiscal Measures on the Czech Economy
Ambriško, Róbert ; Babecký, Jan ; Ryšánek, Jakub ; Valenta, Vilém
We build a satellite DSGE model to investigate the transmission of fiscal policy to the real economy in the Czech Republic. Our model shares features of the Czech National Bank’s current g3 forecasting model (Andrle, Hl´edik, Kamen´ık, and Vlˇcek, 2009), but contains a more comprehensive fiscal sector. Crucial fiscal parameters, related mainly to the specified fiscal rule, are estimated using Bayesian techniques. We calculate a set of fiscal multipliers for individual revenue and expenditure items of the government budget. We find that the largest real GDP fiscal multipliers in the first year are associated with government investment (0.4) and social security contributions paid by employers (0.3), followed by government consumption (0.2).
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Fiscal Discretion in the Czech Republic in 2001–2011: Has It Been Stabilizing?
Ambriško,Róbert ; Augusta, Vítězslav ; Hájková, Dana ; Král, Petr ; Netušilová, Pavla ; Říkovský, Milan ; Soukup, Pavel
We survey discretionary measures of Czech fiscal policy in the period 2001–2011 and analyze their episodes and macroeconomic impacts. We use bottom-up and top-down methods to identify fiscal discretion and we compare the results with Kalman filtering. Fiscal discretion is found to be used frequently and to be large in several years. At the same time, the results signal that macroeconomic stabilisation has not been major aim of fiscal discretion measures. For example, in the years of economic recession 2010–2011, the government put emphasis on pro-cyclical consolidation.
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