Inflation depends generically on current and expected monetary and fiscal policies. There are three ways to carry $1 today into the future: money, bonds, and real assets. That dollar’s purchasing power varies inversely with the price level. The real return on money depends on the flow of transactions services it supports and the expected inflation rate; the analogous return on bonds is the nomi...

Cost-effective, sustainable strategies are urgently required to curb the global obesity epidemic. To date, fiscal policies such as taxes and subsidies have been driven largely by imperatives to raise revenue or increase supply, rather than to change population behaviours. This paper reviews the economic evaluation literature around the use of fiscal policies to prevent obesity. The cost-effecti...

This paper assesses the limitations of monetary and fiscal policies for establishing long-term growth trajectories and instead proposes a technology-based economic strategy targeted at long-term growth in productivity. The model expands the original Schumpeterian concept of technology as the long-term driver of economic growth where technology is characterized as a homogeneous entity developed ...

Precis: Monetary and fiscal policies are examined in a steady-state small open economy model. Com­ plete price taking behaviour implies that domestic output is supply determined and invariant to domestic shocks. Balanced budget fiscal policy does, however, alter equilibrium real disposable income. As the terms of trade do not vary with the exchange rate regime the effectiveness of macro policie...

This short paper reconsiders the popular result that the lower the probability of getting reelected, the stronger the incumbent politicians’ incentive to follow short-sighted, inefficient policies. The set-up is a general equilibrium model of endogenous growth and optimal fiscal policy, in which two political parties can alternate in power. We show that re-election uncertainty is not enough to ...

We study the sustainability of public debt in a closed production economy where a benevolent government chooses fiscal policies, including haircuts on its outstanding debt, in a discretionary manner. Government bonds are held by domestic agents to smooth consumption over time and because they provide collateral and liquidity services. We characterize a recursive equilibrium where public debt am...

This paper incorporates a distortionary tax into a microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. The money constraint in the decentralized market plays a key role in the optimal policy. Only if the constraint is binding can fiscal policy alter the agents’ surplus shares; monetary, but not fiscal, policy affects the agents’ bargaining position, leaving a special...

The severe global economic downturn and the large stimulus programs that governments in many countries adopted in response have generated a resurgence in research on the effects of fiscal policy. One key lesson emerging from this research is that there is no single fiscal multiplier that sums up the economic impact of fiscal policy. Rather, the impact varies widely depending on the specific fis...

economic development plans normally contain some policy objectives, especially for the most important macroeconomic variables. governments are expected to take best policies to achieve these objectives, although due to some structural or other impediments they may fail to touch the objectives. we have attempted to uncover the determinants of private consumption and investment as the objectives ...

The term fiscal sustainability has many definitions, though it almost always refers to the fiscal policies of a government or the public sector. One concept of sustainability relates to solvency, the ability of the government to service its debt obligations in perpetuity without explicit default. Rarely does fiscal sustainability analysis reach the conclusion that a government is insolvent unle...