Abstract
Recently, the effects of government spending on private consumption have been analyzed through macroeconomic models in which a fraction of agents smooth their intertemporal consumption while the others, the credit constrained ones, consume based on its disposable income. Under this approach, we argue that there is a cointegration relation between private consumption, government spending, and disposable income that allows us to analyze whether government spending crowds in or crowds out private consumption. We estimated this relation for 48 countries using panel error-correction models accounting for common factors and, under the hypothesis that the developing countries have a higher fraction of non-optimizing agents, we analyzed the existence of different effects on developed and developing countries. The results show that government spending crowds in the private consumption in the long run and that the effects are larger in developing countries relatively to developed countries.
Keywords:
Private consumption; Government consumption; Panel cointegration; Developed countries; Developing countries
