Budget deficits and money creation: Exploring their relation before Bretton Woods

Abstract

The sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has rekindled the use of the North–South (core-periphery) terminology to refer to the heterogeneity of countries belonging to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In the gold standard literature, this geographical partition had already been employed to oppose the fiscal profligacy and subsequent problems of convertibility of southern countries against the fiscal probity and long convertibility records of their northern counterparts. We provide statistical evidence that the group of countries that, with available data for 1870–1938, exhibited convertibility problems during the classical gold standard, for this reason called the pre-WWI “sometimes-floaters”, shared a pattern of fiscal dominance. This finding for the sometimes-floaters (southern European and South American countries plus Japan) differs from the non-fiscal dominance pattern that we obtain for the pre-WWI “never-floaters” (northern Europe and North America countries) when the Great War and its aftermath years are omitted. We also show that the presence of fiscal dominance was partly due to the lower levels of tax efficiency and political stability in the South.