Three Essays on Government Deficit and Debt

• Main Authors: Pan, Jiun Nan, 潘俊男
• Other Authors: Huang, Jr Tsung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/14304283708589030202

博士 === 國立政治大學 === 財政研究所 === 100 === This dissertation has assessed empirically the impact of government debt or fiscal deficit on economic growth, attracting of Foreign Direct Investment, and real estate market. First, we establish a panel smooth transition regression model and use 10 OECD-countries panel data from 1988 to 2008 to catch the relation more comprehensively between government debt and the economic growth. The primary finding is that the debt/GDP ratio and economic growth have a nonlinear relationship, and this study calculates the debt/GDP turning point of this concave relationship is roughly between 40.798% and 49.357% on average for the sample, across all models. In addition, all the sample countries’ average debt/GDP ratios are between 10.8%-57.3% except Japan (99.32%) during 1988-2008. This means that, on average for the 10 OECD countries, government debt/GDP ratios above such threshold would have a negative effect on economic growth. In other words, this suggests that for many countries current debt levels already may have a detrimental impact on GDP growth. This evidence constitutes an additional warning signal for policy-makers (this time from a long-term growth perspective). Secondly, we use 30 China-provinces panel data from 1999 to 2010, this study estimated by dynamic panel model that can catch the relation more comprehensively between government deficit and FDI. The primary finding is that the government deficit has the expected sign and is significant. That means when the government face the serious problem of public deficit, it will affect the investment environment and FDI will decline cause the unstable investment environment. This study confirms that fiscal deficits of developing economies, which have been enlarged by the recent crisis, lead to contraction even in long term stable foreign investment flows like FDI. Finally, we use a panel data set of 30 provinces in China for 1999-2010 to explore how the relationship between government deficit, land finance and real estate market. The most important result is that there is a significantly positive relationship between house selling and deed tax/GDP ratio, it means that house selling rapidly increases in the early stage and then smoothly increases in the later stage after the levels of fiscal deficit/GDP ratio exceed approximately 11.65%.