Search results

The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply a distributional impact assessment methodology to empirically analyze distributional impact of public expenditure on human development using data from 20 states in Nigeria. For robustness of the analysis, expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development, energy, housing, environmental protection and portable water resources are employed as predictors of human development. The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development. In contrast, the marginal impact of energy, housing and environmental protection is negative. Among the sectors, education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources expenditure has positive marginal impact while energy, housing and environmental protection have decreasing marginal impact on human development.

Panel approach.

The result reveals that expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development.

A panel approach is used to investigate whether expenditure on education, health, agriculture, rural development and water resources has positive marginal impact on human development.

Most empirical studies on the government expenditure-economic growth nexus suggest a negative relationship between the size of the government expenditures and economic growth especially government consumption expenditures. Given these findings, the government should focus on development expenditures and reduce non-development expenditures for higher economic growth. However, the authors argue that this may not be the case, as government consumption expenditures along with better institutional quality promote growth via reduced corruption, reduction of political risks and good governance. The purpose of this study is to provide empirical evidences that both government consumption and development expenditure promote growth in the presence of better institutional quality.

This paper re-examines the impact of government expenditures on growth whilst controlling institutional factors for a sample of 30 developed and 91 developing countries from 1984 to 2017. Government expenditure is segregated into consumption and development expenditures.

The results are consistent with existing findings where government consumption expenditures have a negative effect on growth and government development expenditures contribute positively towards growth. However, when the authors conditioned government consumption expenditures with institutional variables, results suggest that in the presence of good institutions, both government consumption and development expenditures promote growth.

The findings in this paper suggest that in the presence of good institutions, government consumption expenditures will contribute positively towards growth. The results are relatively consistent for both developing and developed economies, which suggests the importance of institutional factors leading to a parallel movement towards long run growth path. In other words, long run economic growth is driven by a similar institutional environment.

Both developed and developing countries show similar reactions towards consumption and development expenditures. This indicates that despite the level of development, government expenditures do contribute positively towards growth especially in the presence of better-quality institutions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between government expenditure and economic growth in Botswana over the period 1985‒2016. The study employed the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach in investigating the nexus. The study makes the argument that the effectiveness of public spending should be assessed not only against the amount of the expenditure but also by the type of the expenditure. The empirical findings showed that aggregate expenditure has a negative short-run and positive long-run effect on economic growth. When expenditure is disaggregated, both forms of expenditures have a positive short-run effect on economic growth, whereas only a long-run positive impact of recurrent expenditure is observed. The study suggests the need to prioritize scarce resources in productive recurrent and development spending that enables increased productivity.

This study examined the effectiveness of government spending in Botswana, within an ARDL framework from 1985 to 2016. To achieve this, the analysis is carried out on both an aggregate and disaggregated level. Government spending is divided into recurrent and development expenditures.

This study examined the effectiveness of government spending in Botswana, within an ARDL framework from 1985 to 2016. To achieve this, the analysis hinged on both the aggregate and disaggregated levels. The results of the aggregate analysis suggest that total public expenditure has a negative impact on economic growth in the short run; however, its impact becomes positive over the long run. On disaggregating government spending, the results show that both recurrent and development expenditures have a significant positive short-run impact on growth; however, in the long run, the significant positive impact is only observed for recurrent expenditure.

The results provide evidence of the diverse effects of government expenditure in the country. In the period under investigation, 73 percent of total government expenditure in Botswana was recurrent in nature, whereas 23 percent was related to development. From the results, it can be observed that although the recurrent expenditure has contributed to increased growth and must be encouraged, it is also pertinent for the Botswana Government to endeavor to place more emphasis on productive development expenditure in order to enhance short- and long-term growth. Further, there is a need to strengthen the growth-enhancing structures and to prioritize the scarce economic resources toward productive spending and ensuring continued proper governance over such expenditures.

The study provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of government spending in a small open, resource-reliant middle-income SSA economy and argues that the effectiveness of public spending must be assessed not only against the amount of the expenditure but also on the type or composition of the expenditure. The study contributes to the scant empirical literature on Botswana by employing the ARDL approach to cointegration technique in estimating the long- and short-run impact of government expenditure on economic growth between 1985 and 2016.

This study examined the roles of public spending and population moderating characteristic structure of selected African economies on bank-based financial development through credit to private sector.

The study sampled 37 selected African economies for the years 1991–2018, and it applied a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator to account for short-run and long-run causal effects, and confirmed short-run adjustments towards the long-run convergences between the variables. Specific suitable tests were also applied.

Evidence confirms positive impacts of both capital formation and final consumption expenditures on financial development in the short run and long run. The moderation of population structures on expenditure structures help to speed up convergences.

This work attests its innovation by accounting for the separate effects of the expenditure types, the moderation effects of young and mature populations for capital and final consumption expenditure on financial development among selected economies in Africa.

This study aims to investigate the consequence of the quality of governance (QoG) in moderating the effect of healthcare spending on human development.

The authors employ a two-step Windmeijer finite sample-corrected system-generalized method of moments (sys-GMM) estimation technique on a panel dataset of 161 countries from 2005 to 2019. The authors use healthcare expenditure as the main explanatory variable and the Human Development Index (HDI) as the dependent variable and also consider voice and accountability (VnA), political stability and absence of terrorism (PSnAT), governance effectiveness (GoE), regulatory quality (ReQ), rules of law (RLaw) and control of corruption (CoC) dimensions of governance indicators as proxies of good governance. The authors develop a new measure of good governance from these six dimensions of governance using principal component analysis (PCA).

The authors empirically revealed that allocating more healthcare support alone is insufficient to improve human development. Individually, PSnAT has the highest net positive effect on health expenditure that helps to increase human welfare. Further, the corresponding interaction effect between expenditure and the Good Governance Index (GGI) is negative but insignificant for low-income countries (LICs); negative and statistically significant for sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies and positive but insignificant for South Asian nations.

This study is an in-depth analysis of how governance impacts the effectiveness of healthcare expenditure to ensure higher human development, particularly in a large panel of 161 countries. The authors have developed a new index of good governance and later extended the analysis by separating countries based on the income level and geographical location, which are utterly absent in existing literature.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) index represents attributes of firms that are differentiated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of differentiated CSR, CSRS (strategic CSR activities) and CSRD (defensive CSR activities) on R&D expenditure and its effectiveness on firm values.

The sample includes 1,388 firm-year observations for 2004–2015 of listed firms on the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE) whose CSR measures, KEJI (Korea Economic Justice Institute) index are available from the Citizens' Coalition for Economic Justice (2016).

The results show that while CSRS is positively associated with R&D expenditure, CSRD is not. Further, development costs and its interaction term with CSRS positively affect firm values.

This study provides an important reason to separate the attributes of the CSR in future empirical studies. The results imply that the study of effects of CSR on sustainable growth or firm values should focus on CSRS rather than CSR activities in general in future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of public expenditure on economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries like India. If poverty and inequality are high, the government may resort to distributive policies at the cost of long-term growth. The distributive policies and poverty alleviation measures fail to achieve success due to lack of good governance, lack of proper targeting and problems in the implementation of such schemes. On the other hand, if the nature of public expenditure is such that it enhances per capita income, it will help reduce poverty.

After analytical digression and construction of hypotheses panel regression has been done using state-level data in the Indian context to empirically verify the above propositions. Both Fixed effects and Random effects models have been used for this purpose.

The results show that in states where ratio of public expenditure on the development of infrastructure such as road, irrigation, power, transport and communication is higher, per capita income is also higher and incidence of poverty is lower indicating that economic growth is important for poverty alleviation and development of infrastructure is necessary for growth.

This study demonstrates how public policy and public finance can be used as instruments for removal of poverty.

This paper aims to re-examine the impact of government expenditure on income inequality. Existing studies provide mixed results on whether government expenditure reduces or increases income inequality. In this paper, government expenditure is viewed as a tool for redistribution, hence, its impact on inequality is examined.

A sample of 122 countries with 91 and 31 countries categorized as developing and developed countries is used. The dynamic panel threshold regression is used to examine the impact of government expenditure on income inequality and to estimate the turning point of the negative or positive effects.

The major findings suggest that, in general, government expenditure does reduce income inequality. Results from developed countries support the inversed U-shaped Kuznet curve where higher government expenditure initially led to more inequality but would eventually bring about a positive effect after a certain threshold level. For developing countries, education and development expenditure were the driving forces towards lower income inequality.

Several policy implications can be derived from this paper. First, government expenditure is a useful tool to alleviate the problem of income inequality. More integration with the global economy via trading activities is also an important channel to help reduce income inequality. Finally, better institutional quality provides an effective ecosystem in promoting better redistribution of income via government expenditure.

This paper presents a maiden attempt to estimate a threshold value or when government expenditure starts to reduce or increase income inequality. The sample is segregated into developed and developing countries to further control the effect of government size and the level of development of a country.

The purpose of this study is to examine the usefulness of pre‐production cash expenditure forecasts issued by Australian mining explorers in their quarterly cash‐flow reports.

Usefulness is determined by examining compliance and the reliability of forecasts (accuracy and bias) for a sample of 1,760 forecasts issued by 481 explorers in 2005/2006. The cross‐sectional variation in reliability is examined using regression analysis.

The findings reveal a high level of compliance but significant inaccuracies (median forecast error of around 50 percent of actual expenditure for exploration and evaluation expenditure and 85 percent for development expenditure), and some evidence of forecast bias. Forecast inaccuracy is more prevalent in firms that have poorer performance, greater financial slack, greater cash‐flow volatility, no financial leverage, and for firms that are smaller, in the pre‐development stage, and in the mineral (non‐oil and gas) sub‐industry.

The analysis of forecast usefulness is confined to compliance and reliability. Further research could consider the value‐relevance and predictive ability of these forecasts.

The findings question the usefulness of mandatory forecasting by showing that the information role of forecasts in capital markets is impaired when firms have little discretion over the forecast decision, timing and specificity.

This is the first study to examine mandatory cash expenditure forecasts and makes a significant contribution to the small literature on mandatory financial forecasts.