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The Political Economy of Fiscal Reforms

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Abstract

In this chapter we discuss various proposals to reform government policy and process. The motivation for the reforms is resolving the fiscal crisis discussed in previous chapters. The fiscal crisis is the major issue facing the governments of developed countries during the twenty-first century. The crisis is connected with the important economic phenomena of the century, including aging of the population, slowing of long-run economic growth, and rising wage inequality. Our discussion is focused primarily on the U.S., but most of the discussion applies to the OECD countries generally.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Galor (2011, pp. 46–54).

  2. 2.

    Kotlikoff and Burns (2012, pp. 14–15).

  3. 3.

    Lindert (2004, pp. 193–195).

  4. 4.

    Cost (2015, pp. 235–237).

  5. 5.

    Kotlikoff and Burns (2012, p. 20). One response to an aging population is to encourage immigration. However, many richer countries push back against more liberal immigration because people believe it lowers wages of low skilled natives and threatens “national identity.” Instead some countries have tried to reverse aging by encouraging fertility through various government subsidies that support marriage and childbearing (e.g. see Emont 2020).

  6. 6.

    Pauly (2014, p. 20).

  7. 7.

    Sheiner (2014).

  8. 8.

    Gruber (2011).

  9. 9.

    Kotlikoff and Burns (2012, p. 131).

  10. 10.

    Ho (2014) and Skinner (2013).

  11. 11.

    Sheiner (2014, Figure 4a).

  12. 12.

    Gordon (2016, Figure 1–2).

  13. 13.

    OECD (2015, Table A1).

  14. 14.

    See, for example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014).

  15. 15.

    See Vijg (2011) and Gordon (2016).

  16. 16.

    Kotlikoff (2015, Chart 2).

  17. 17.

    Dobrescu et al. (2012).

  18. 18.

    See Friedman and Mandlebaum (2012) and Malinovskaya and Wessel (2017).

  19. 19.

    Aghion et al. (2013).

  20. 20.

    Vijg (2011).

  21. 21.

    OECD (2015, pp. 51–52).

  22. 22.

    OECD (2014, Figure 2).

  23. 23.

    Gordon (2016, p. 513) and Katz (2005, pp. 270–274).

  24. 24.

    Carneiro and Heckman (2005, Figure 2.2 (a)) and Turner (2004, Figures 1.1, 1.2).

  25. 25.

    Turner (2004, Figure 1.5).

  26. 26.

    National Center for Education Statistics (2015).

  27. 27.

    NSC Research Center (2015).

  28. 28.

    See Adams (2016) and Hanushek (2005, pp. 252–259) for U.S. SAT scores and Rothwell (2016) for OECD scores of basic workforce skills.

  29. 29.

    Bennet and Wilezol (2013, Chapter 4).

  30. 30.

    Bennet and Wilezol (2013, p. 139).

  31. 31.

    Bennet and Wilezol (2013, p. 146).

  32. 32.

    See Abel and Deitz (2014) and Asworth and Ransom (2018).

  33. 33.

    For the United States see Carneiro and Heckman (2005) and Putnam (2015). For the UK and the OECD as a group, see Besley et al. (2013) and OECD (2014, p. 45).

  34. 34.

    Heckman et al. (2010).

  35. 35.

    Carneiro and Heckman (2005).

  36. 36.

    Cingano (2014).

  37. 37.

    OECD (2014).

  38. 38.

    Autor (2014).

  39. 39.

    Bennett and Wilezol (2013), Hoffman (2011), Murray (2008), and Putnam (2015).

  40. 40.

    Steuerle (2014, p. 110).

  41. 41.

    Cingano (2014), Corak (2014), Lynch 2005, and Woessman (2015).

  42. 42.

    See, for example, Kotlikoff and Burns (2012). More recent policy reforms can be found in Riedl (2018) and Gale (2019).

  43. 43.

    Kotlikoff and Burns (2012, Figure 4.2).

  44. 44.

    Gokhale et al. (1996).

  45. 45.

    Gokhale (2014, p. 77).

  46. 46.

    Simpson-Bowles Commission (2010), Steuerle (2014), and Alm (2014).

  47. 47.

    Coile and Gruber (2007), Gruber and Wise (2004) and Gustman and Steinmeier (2015).

  48. 48.

    Kotlikoff (2015).

  49. 49.

    Auerbach et al. (2004).

  50. 50.

    See data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2016). Eliminating tax expenditures and other simplifications of the tax code would also help to eliminate tax evasion and corruption associated with tax collection. See, for example , Awasthi and Bayraktar (2015).

  51. 51.

    Clarke et al. (2015).

  52. 52.

    Perry (2013).

  53. 53.

    See Dave and Kaestner (2006), Stanciole (2008), and Dave et al. (2015).

  54. 54.

    See, for example, the survey in Stupak and Marples (2016).

  55. 55.

    Carneiro et al. (2011).

  56. 56.

    Murray (2008), Kotlikoff and Burns (2012), and Bennett and Wilezol (2013).

  57. 57.

    Gordon and Hedlund (2016) and Lucca et al. (2015).

  58. 58.

    See Ginsberg (2011) and Delisle (2017).

  59. 59.

    Carneiro and Heckman (2005), Aghion et al. (2013), Murray (2008, pp. 147–162), Bennett and Wilezol (2013, pp. 169–172), and Bustamente et al. (2017).

  60. 60.

    See Heckman et al. (2010), Heckman et al. (2013), and Garcia et al. (2020). These studies evaluate small-scale programs. The results in Walters (2015) and Attanasio et al. (2017a) indicate that large-scale pre-school programs, if properly structured, can also have lasting positive effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

  61. 61.

    Attanasio et al. (2017b) and Jacob (2017).

  62. 62.

    Germany, in addition to having a well-respected vocational training system that serves about half of their students, performs well on basic reading and math skills of its young workforce (Lynch (2005)). See Trines (2018) for a discussion of how the German system might be used as a model for the U.S. For labor shortages in occupations not requiring a college education see Coster (2010), Duncan (2017), and Collins (2018).

  63. 63.

    See Duncan (2017), Holzer and Lerman (2009), Lerman (2012), and Newman and Winston (2016).

  64. 64.

    Romer and Romer (2010), DeVries et al. (2011), Alesina et al. (2015, 2017) and Alesina and de Rugy (2013).

  65. 65.

    See also the long-term budgeting plan proposed by Stuart Butler (2016).

  66. 66.

    See Joyce (2011) for a history of the CBO and a discussion of its role in policy making.

  67. 67.

    Auerbach (2012) and Penner (2014).

  68. 68.

    Kotlikoff (2003).

  69. 69.

    Easterly et al. (2004) and Raghuram and Subramanian (2005, 2008, 2011).

  70. 70.

    See Chap. 6 and Das et al. (2018, Chapter 5).

  71. 71.

    Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2012, Chapter 7).

  72. 72.

    Clemens and Kremer (2016).

  73. 73.

    Clemens and Kremer (2016) and Ravallion (2016).

  74. 74.

    Ingram (2016).

  75. 75.

    Ivanyna et al. (2016) simulates the effects of cracking down on tax evasion before first dealing with corruption.

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Ivanyna, M., Mourmouras, A., Rangazas, P. (2021). The Political Economy of Fiscal Reforms. In: The Macroeconomics of Corruption. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67557-8_8

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