Working Paper

Fiscal policy and productivity growth in the OECD

Abstract: We use a simple endogenous growth model with productive public capital to investigate the degree to which observed fiscal policies in eight OECD countries can account for slowdowns in the growth rates of aggregate labor productivity since 1970. In model simulations, we find that none of the observed public capital policies can generate slowdowns of sufficient magnitude to match those in the data. For most countries in our sample, a simulation that combines the observed public capital policy with the observed tax policy does a better job of accounting for the slowdown than either policy in isolation.

Keywords: Fiscal policy; Infrastructure (Economics);

Status: Published in Canadian Journal of Economics (November 1999)

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Part of Series: Working Papers in Applied Economic Theory

Publication Date: 1999

Number: 99-02