Effects of Fiscal Rules and Political Framework: Evidence from COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19-Crisis impacted economic growth globally, opening up the need for public spending. These conditions put national fiscal authorities under pressure, challenging them primarily to remedy the economic downturn, and secondly to balance fiscal resources. We analyze whether alternative institutional frameworks, fiscal rules and political regimes across numerous countries can explain different economic outcomes following the COVID-19-Crisis. The empirical results show that growth in GDP affects gross debt negatively, government revenue positively, and national savings positively for all subsets, except for the federal subset. The effect on government revenue for fiscal subset is higher than for no fiscal rule. In almost all the subgroup models, it can be observed that the COVID-19 period has a positive effect on gross government debt and a negative on government revenue, except for federal countries and countries with a fiscal rule and a majority government. For all subsets the effect of the COVID-19 variable is not significant in the national savings regression models. For the countries in the federal subset the explanatory variables are unable to reduce the government debt. Conclusively, we could propose adaptive fiscal rules, which motivate fiscal authorities to maintain fiscal balance in long debt and in the annual budget.