Suchergebnisse

Governments often support their preferences for decentralized (centralized) bureaucracies on the grounds of efficiency considerations (production side). Here, we consider the demand side, i.e., whether the government perception of citizens' demand for differentiated goods/services might increase efficiency by simply reshuffling bureaucratic production activities. We represent the budgetary process—between an incumbent governing party and n-competing bureaus producing differentiated goods/services—as a simultaneous Nash-compliance game with complete information. On these grounds, we analyse—in terms of public production, players' rents and payoffs—the effects of increasing competition (as for the number of bureaus) in the political–bureaucratic market. Moreover, we evaluate, ceteris paribus, the effects of bureaucratic reshuffling from the point of view of society, assumed to prefer those policies that approximate social efficiency by minimizing bureaucratic and political rents.

For a panel of 21 OECD heterogeneous countries from 1991 to 2015, we study governments' reactions to the accumulation of debt and look at whether governments voluntary take corrective measures when the debt-GDP ratio starts rising or they rather let the debt grow. We distinguish between discretionary and automatic response of primary balance of government actions, as captured by the structural component of public primary balance and by cyclical component of public primary balance. We show the existence of a systematic long-term relationship between debt and structural primary balance supporting the view that the long-term governments' discretionary response to increases in the debt-GDP ratio is negative, that is, governments are not currently taking long-term actions that counteract the increases in debts and do not satisfy the intertemporal budget constraint. In the short term, an asymmetric fiscal policy response exploiting the output gap, by part of the political class of the countries considered, seems to emerge: it intervenes with a new deficit and debt when the output gap is positive, but it does not adopt a symmetrical correction when the situation is reversed.