Asymmetries in the revenue-expenditure nexus: A tale of three countries

The objective of this paper is to examine the government revenue and expenditure relationship in the context of what is known as the soft and hard budget constraint strategy. We adopt a nonlinear framework with structural breaks and focus our empirical analysis in three countries. Two of them represent the two extremes of polities in the EU: Sweden and Greece and the third, Germany is used for comparison purposes. Our results indicate absence of any asymmetries, TAR or MTAR, for Sweden and Germany. The symmetric ECM provides support for the fiscal synchronization hypothesis of revenues and expenditures in both countries. For Greece, however, we find evidence for asymmetries of the MTAR form, which in turn support the spend-and-tax hypothesis with asymmetric adjustment towards the long-run equilibrium. This indicates that the Greek fiscal authorities would cut deficits only if they exceeded a high “trigger” threshold, which gives support to the soft budget constraint strategy to gain political support. The fiscal adjustment takes place by cutting government expenditure. The out-of-sample forecast results suggest that a shift from a univariate model specification to a multivariate model improves marginally the forecast performance.

► We use the TAR/MTAR models. ► Threshold value (deficit/GDP) for Greece is too high. ► Greek governments follow the soft budget constraint strategy. ► Fiscal adjustment in Greece takes place by cutting government expenditure. ► German and Swedish governments follow the hard budget constrain strategy.