IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/1999-063.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Spend Now, Pay Later? Tax Smoothing and Fiscal Sustainability in South Asia

Author

Listed:
  • International Monetary Fund

Abstract

This paper tests a version of Barro’s tax-smoothing model, which assumes intertemporal optimization by a government seeking to minimize the distortionary costs of taxation, using Pakistan and Sri Lankan data for 1956-95 and 1964-97, respectively. The empirical results indicate that Pakistan’s fiscal behavior is consistent with tax smoothing, but not Sri Lanka’s. Moreover, fiscal behavior in both countries was dominated by a stagnation of revenues, large tax-tilting-induced deficits, and the consequent accumulation of excessive public liabilities. Analysis of the time-series characteristics of tax-tilting behavior indicates that for both countries the stock of public liabilities is unsustainable under unchanged fiscal policies.

Suggested Citation

  • International Monetary Fund, 1999. "Spend Now, Pay Later? Tax Smoothing and Fiscal Sustainability in South Asia," IMF Working Papers 1999/063, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:1999/063
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=3021
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Taner Turan & Mesut Karakas & Halit Yanikkaya, 2014. "Tax Smoothing Hypothesis: A Turkish Case," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 61(4), pages 487-501, September.
    2. Gerhard Reitschuler, 2010. "Fiscal Policy And Optimal Taxation: Evidence From A Tax Smoothing Exercise," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 57(2), pages 238-252, May.
    3. Johan Adler, 2006. "The Tax‐smoothing Hypothesis: Evidence from Sweden, 1952–1999," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 108(1), pages 81-95, March.
    4. Ihtsham Padda, 2014. "On minimizing the welfare cost of fiscal policy: evidence from South Asia," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 1553-1572, May.
    5. Pastén, Roberto, 2017. "The political economy of the fiscal deficit in nineteenthcentury Chile," Revista CEPAL, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), April.
    6. Adler, Johan, 2003. "Has Sweden’s government budget policy been too discretionary? Evidence from a generalization of the tax smoothing hypothesis," Working Papers in Economics 89, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    7. Roberto Pasten & James P. Cover, 2010. "The Political Economy of Unsustainable Fiscal Deficits," Latin American Journal of Economics-formerly Cuadernos de Economía, Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile., vol. 47(136), pages 169-189.
    8. Obeng, Samuel, 2015. "A Causality Test of the Revenue-Expenditure Nexus in Ghana," MPRA Paper 63735, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 25 Feb 2015.
    9. Samia OMRANE BELGUITH & Foued Badr GABSI & Ameni MTIBAA, 2018. "Tax smoothing hypothesis: The Tunisian case," Theoretical and Applied Economics, Asociatia Generala a Economistilor din Romania / Editura Economica, vol. 0(4(617), W), pages 169-178, Winter.
    10. Gerhard Reitschuler, 2011. "Optimal taxation and budget deficits: Evidence for the EU's New Member States," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 31(3), pages 2593-2602.
    11. Pastén, Roberto & Cover, James P., 2015. "Tax tilting and politics: Some theory and evidence for Latin America," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 208-218.
    12. Angyridis, Constantine, 2009. "Balanced budget vs. Tax smoothing in a small open economy: A welfare comparison," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 438-463, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:1999/063. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.