Economic Research Bulletin (2013, No.2)

This edition of the Research Bulletin focuses on four articles which analyse the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy. The first article examines the interactions between monetary and fiscal policies in six industrialised countries during 1980–2008. Employing a novel empirical framework, the article documents changes in monetary-fiscal interactions over time. Next, these changes are linked to the monetary policy regime set-up. The second article assesses the extent to which fiscal discretion in the Czech Republic contributed to smoothing the real economy over the business cycle in the past decade. Using several alternative approaches, the results suggest that fiscal discretionary measures have been procyclical, that is, have amplified business cycle fluctuations. The third article analyses in an empirical framework how unexpected changes to government spending and revenues affect the Czech economy. The article detects certain regularities and at the same time shows the limits of the existing identification methods when applied to short Czech fiscal data. The fourth article takes a complementary approach by building a dynamic stochastic general equilib rium (DSGE) model to quantify the effects of fiscal measures on the expenditure and revenue sides of the Czech economy. The model, which is still rather in the development stage, demonstrates the potential for calculating fiscal multipliers and simulating the macroeconomic effects of fiscal measures for individual categories of the government budget.