The Credibility of Fiscal Rules Policy and Business Cycle Volatility

Abstract

The aim of this paper is two-fold; first, it studies the impact of the credibility of fiscal rule policy on the stability of output growth; second, it compares the effectiveness of fiscal rule policy to discretionary and automatic stabilizer fiscal policies to address the fluctuation of output growth. Employing quarterly data over the period 2001-2013 in the case of Indonesia, we obtain that the credible debt rule leads to a decrease in the volatility of output growth while the non-credible deficit rule does not have any effect. Both unsystematic and systematic components of discretionary fiscal policy have a stabilizing function. Interestingly, the automatic stabilization tends to induce the volatility of output growth. Given those results, we infer that government spending is not a good automatic stabilizer. It seems that the lower ratio of government expenditure to GDP along with improving credibility of deficit rule policy has a smoother effect on the economy. Therefore, they implicitly support expenditure cuts when implementing fiscal adjustment with the purpose of reaching fiscal sustainability in the short-run and a stable economic growth in the long-run.