Fiscal laxity or inflection? Fiscal policy in Roussef’s government and the economic crisis

Abstract

Fiscal policy played a leading role in the debate on the trajectory of the Brazilian economy in the first half of 2010 to explain the economic slowdown and subsequent recession, both in orthodox and heterodox contributions. Orthodox economics points to uncontrolled public spending as being responsible for the fiscal deterioration, which would have led to worsening agents' expectations and falling investments. Heterodox economics, in a roughly opposite interpretation, points to an inflection of fiscal policy that, reducing spending, particularly investment, at the beginning of the decade, would have compromised the policy-inducing capacity in a demand-led growth model. This article aims to empirically evaluate these explanations. In addition to a descriptive analysis of the data, we propose a vector autoregression (VAR) model to examine how the fiscal policy elements pointed out by each of the perspectives discussed here have affected economic growth. In particular, we aim to investigate whether they are able to explain the downturn and the recession in the period analyzed. The results indicate, contrarily to the orthodox view, that spending did not skyrocket compared to previous governments, and that movements in output tend to precede changes in the fiscal outcome. They also point to the importance of public investment in determining the pace of activity, confirming a central element of the heterodox approach. However, by revealing that up to 2014 public spending continued to grow, indicates the insufficiency of the heterodox thesis to explain the slowdown in previous years and the depth of the subsequent recession. Given this, we present additional explanatory elements to understand the period.

Keywords: Fiscal policy; Recession; Public investment; VAR model