The article Public Choice, currently a "B" journal according to the FIISEG classification and with an impact factor of 0.698 according to the Journal of Citations Report, has been accepted for publication in the scientific journal Public Choice.
"Fiscal Policy Responsiveness, Persistence, and Discretion", by António Afonso, researcher at UECE and Associate Professor with Aggregation at ISEG. The paper was co-authored with Luca Agnello (ECB) and Davide Furceri (OECD).
The paper studies the different features of fiscal policy using a two-step procedure. First, budget expenditure and revenue are decomposed into three components: (i) responsiveness to economic activity, (ii) persistence and (iii) discretion. Second, the causes of those three components are studied. With data for 132 countries, the results show that the persistence component of fiscal policy is more important than the response to economic conditions, which means that the authorities have less room for maneuver in the short run, notably to reduce public expenditure. On the other hand, countries with a stronger fiscal persistence component tend to exhibit less discretion and more mitigated responses to economic fluctuations. Finally, macroeconomic, institutional and geographical variables explain differences in fiscal components across countries."
