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With China’s economic growth slowing down and the growth rate of fiscal revenue decreasing, the pressure on local government debts is further increasing. Under this background, it is of great significance to clarify the relation between local government debts and China’s economic growth in order to give full play to the positive role of local debts in stabling growth. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Therefore, this paper explores the impact of Chinese local government debt on economic growth from theoretical and empirical aspects, respectively, and compares the regional differences between different debts and economic growth dynamics.

In the theoretical model part, this paper constructs a three-sector dynamic game model, under the two circumstances of whether local government is subject to debt constraints, and examines the relation between local government debt and economic growth and other variables through numerical simulation. Research shows that when the government is not constrained by debt, there is an inverted “U” relation between government debt and economic growth. When the government is constrained by debt, the economic growth rate gradually decreases as the government debt increases.

In the theoretical analysis part, this paper tries to estimate the amount of local debts under different calibers and examines the impact of different types of local government debts on China’s economic growth and their regional differences. The results show that excessive accumulation of government hidden debts in the eastern region is not conducive to economic growth, while explicit debts in the central and western regions significantly contribute to local economic growth. The results of empirical analysis are basically consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model.

More and more statistics have repeatedly shown that as the economic development has entered the New Normal, the Chinese fiscal system has experienced tremendous changes. Although chance cannot be ruled out, much of those changes indicate trends, and they can even be said to be the result of the law of economic development. These trends and changes have repeatedly demonstrated that, as a reflection and an inevitable result of the economic developing speed shift, structural adjustment and energy conversion, the Chinese fiscal system, far from the conventional operating state, has progressed on a new path. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper systematically analyzes several new trends and changes in the Chinese fiscal system under the New Normal. First, revenue growth has experienced a sharp downward trend, while the tax elasticity coefficient has declined rapidly. Second, fiscal expenditure has risen against the tendency, while the rigidity of expenditure has kept on increasing.

Considering the present fiscal and taxation system reform with the analysis above, it can be seen that if the reform’s progress for the past two years is slower than expected – thus, preventing the effects of all aspects from a timely achievement – then, in the recent period, the agreement on the fiscal and taxation system reform will be reached and challenges entirely different from the past, including sharp slowdown in revenue growth rate, fiscal expenditure rising against trend and increases in fiscal deficit and government debts will be faced. The factors encouraging the reform are gathering gradually. The growth of the strength to push the reform forward is speeding up. And the pace of the reform in relevant areas is quickening.

In the face of those trends and changes, on the one hand, the authors should deeply understand and accurately grasp them through a comprehensive summary and systematic analysis. On the other hand, a series of conventional ideas, thoughts and strategies should be adjusted comprehensively and duly. Taking a train of new ideas, thoughts and strategies, the authors ought to actively adapt to and initiate a new Chinese fiscal structure under the New Normal of China’s economy.

African countries are endowed with both human and natural resources. These resources constitute integral components for any economic development due to the long-lasting relationship with all sectors in an economy, yet there is an obvious disagreement between growing economy and employment generation in Africa. Though there has been a growing pattern of economic size, particularly the gross domestic product (GDP) among African countries, most of these economies are low in human development. The disagreement between economic growth and employment generation in Africa despite abundant natural resources located on the continent calls for public discourse among scholars. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to examine the peculiar drivers of unemployment intensity in a region characterized by endowed resources.

The paper adopts two approaches; the authors employed the pooled mean group (PMG) estimator and utilised stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to generate a government efficiency index between the period 1991 and 2017 among sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries.

The empirical results through the single output-multiple inputs framework indicate that on average, there is a low level of government efficiency towards increasing the objective of human development in Africa. However, in the long run, natural resource endowment has a positive and significant relationship with employment generation for SSA. Hence, the study established that a low level of government efficiency has a long-lasting effect on low human development experienced in Africa.

The need to improve the level of government efficiency towards economic development by making both human and physical capital more effective will spur the exploration of natural resources.

The paper provides an empirical study of the effectiveness and efficiency of government through PMG and SFA in establishing the relationship between government approaches and employment level in selected SSA countries.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between fiscal policy (tax revenues and government expenditure) and economic happiness. The panel data are used from 2012 to 2016 for 18 countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The study adopted the Barro (1990) model of endogeneity growth to characterize the relationship between fiscal policy and economic happiness. The study estimated the model by using the pooled ordinary least squares method, the fixed effects method and the random-effects method. In addition, the study used the dynamic estimate of this relationship rather than the conventional static estimate through the generalized method of moments’ method. This leads to overcoming the endogeneity problem between the dependent variable and the independent variables.

The main findings indicated that there is a negative and statistically significant relationship between nondistortionary taxes and economic happiness. Also, there is no relationship between public expenditure and economic happiness, whether productive or nonproductive. The results confirmed a positive and significant relationship between other revenues and economic happiness. The current study recommended the diversification of other public revenue sources to increase its contribution to public expenditure financing and the restructuring of the tax system, particularly nondistortionary taxes. These taxes must be replaced by other revenues or by distortionary taxes to increase economic happiness.

The research represents a strong starting base that can help researchers to conduct more studies on economic happiness by using different measures and comparing their results to find out the determinants of happiness. The relationship between economic happiness and fiscal policy with its different aspects requires more studies, especially the relationship between taxes and economic happiness in our region. The study of the relationship between public expenditure and economic happiness according to economic activities can guide decision-makers to direct the expenditure toward economic activities that achieve the happiness of their citizens. Enriching this study requires the availability of fiscal data for the entire MENA region for longer periods, which allow us to divide the countries of the region into petroleum and nonpetroleum countries, but the scarcity of data is one of the limitations of the study.

The governments of MENA countries should diversify other public revenue sources to increase the financing public expenditure by the expense of tax revenues, especially nondistortionary taxes, which would increase the economic happiness of their citizens.

This study is one of the rare studies that investigate the relationship between fiscal policy and economic happiness at the global level. This study contributed to filling the gap of this issue in the MENA region and enriching global literature through the experience of the MENA region. Moreover, this study investigated all aspects of fiscal policy, in contrast to other studies that focused on one of its aspects. The weakness in these studies is because of the lack of correlation between the sources of revenues and the face of their spending.

One of the main theories regarding the relationship between government expenditure and gross domestic product (GDP) is Wagner’s law. This law was developed in the late-19th century by Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), a prominent German economist, and depicts that an increase in government expenditure is a feature often associated with progressive states. This paper aims to examine the validity of Wagner’s law in Egypt for 1960–2018. The relationship between real government expenditure and real GDP is tested using three versions of Wagner’s law.

To test the validity of Wagner in Egypt, law time-series analysis is used. The methodology used in this paper is: unit-root tests for stationarity, Johansen cointegration approach, error-correction model and Granger causality.

The results provide strong evidence of long-term relationship between GDP and government expenditure. Moreover, the causal relationship is found to be bi-directional. Hence, this study provides support for Wagner’s law in the examined context.

It should be noted, however, that there are some limitations to this study. For instance, in this paper, the government’s size was measured through government consumption expenditure rather than government expenditure due to data availability, which does not fully capture the government size. Moreover, the data available was limited and does not fully cover the earliest stages of industrialization and urbanization for Egypt. Furthermore, although time-series analysis provides a more contextualized results and conclusions, the obtained conclusions suffer from their limited generalizability.

This paper aims to specifically make a contribution to the empirical literature for Wagner’s law, by testing the Egyptian data using time-series econometric techniques for the longest time period examined so far, which is 1960–2018.

The purpose of this paper is to assess both short and long-term influences of public investment on economic growth and test the hypothesis that whether public investment promotes or demotes private investment in Vietnam.

The authors use the approach of autoregressive distributed lag model and Vietnam’s macro data in the period of 1990-2016, to evaluate the short and long-term effects of public investment on economic growth and private investment. The model evaluates the impact of public investment on economic growth and private investment based on the neoclassical theories. The public investment which strongly affects economic growth is also reflected by aggregate supply and demand. Public investment directly impacts aggregate demand as a government expenditure and aggregate supply as a production function (capital factor).

The results from this research indicate that public investment in Vietnam in the past period does affect economic growth in the pattern of an inverted-U shape as of Barro (1990), with positive effects mostly occurring from the second year and negative effects of constraining long-term growth. Meanwhile, investment from the private sector, state-owned enterprises, and FDI has positive effects on short-term economic growth and state-owned capital stock has positive impacts on economic growth in both the short and long run. The estimated influence of public investment on private investment also shows a similar inverted-U shape in which public investment have crowding-in private investment short-term but crowding-out in the long run.

The empirical findings in this study can be used for conducting a more efficient policy in restructuring the state sector investment in Vietnam.

The main contributions in this study are: to evaluate the impacts of public investment on economic growth and private investment, the authors extracted public investment in infrastructure from aggregate investment of state sector (as previous studies used); the authors also uses state-owned capital stock variable including cumulative public investment and state-owned enterprises investment suggesting that this could control for the different orders of integration between the stock and flow variable and improve the experimental characteristics of the equation to a higher degree.

The core of the micro–macro paradigm of mainstream Western economics is the assumption that a rational economic man with complete freedom of economic behaviors living in a fully competitive, free-market economy pursues maximum personal benefits. The purpose of this paper is to show the reasons for failure of mainstream Western economics explaining the “mystery of China’s economic growth” and the necessity of understanding the mystery from the paradigm of realm economics.

The system of socialism with Chinese characteristics led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the local governments that play a crucial role in the reform and opening-up has the realm attribute. It is necessary to develop a new paradigm for realm economic analysis and promote the creation of new economic globalization and international political and economic order.

According to the fourth plenary session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, “Since the New China was founded 70 years ago, our Party has led our people to create the rarely-seen miracle of rapid economic development and miracle of long-term social stability”. The authors find that it is effective and necessary to explain the miracle of China’s economic growth from the paradigm of realm economics.

As proven by practice, the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the governance system of China are guided by Marxism, rooted in China with a deep Chinese cultural foundation, and sincerely supported by the people.

The purpose of this study is to seek to re-examine the threshold effects of public debt on economic growth in Africa.

This study applies panel smooth transition regression approach advanced by González et al. (2017). The method allows for both heterogeneity as well as a smooth change of regression coefficients from one regime to another.

A debt threshold in the range of 62–66% is estimated for the whole sample. Low debt is found to be growth neutral but higher public debt is growth detrimental. For middle-income and resource-intensive countries, a debt threshold in the range of 58–63% is estimated. As part of robustness checks, a dynamic panel threshold model was also applied to deal with the endogeneity of debt, and a much higher debt threshold was estimated, at 74.3%. While low public debt is found to be either growth neutral or growth enhancing, high public debt is consistently detrimental to growth.

The findings of this study show that there is no single debt threshold applicable to all African countries, and confirm that the debt threshold level is sensitive to modeling choices. While further analysis is still needed to suggest a policy, the findings of this study show that high debt is detrimental to growth.

The novelty of this study is twofold. Contrary to previous studies on Africa, this study applies a different estimation technique which allows for heterogeneity and a smooth change of regression coefficients from one regime to another. Another novelty distinct from the previous studies is that, for robustness checks, this study divides the sample into low- and middle-income countries, and into resource- and nonresource intensive countries, as debt experience can differ among country groups. Further, as part of robustness checks, another estimation method is also applied in which the threshold variable (debt) is allowed to be endogenous.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the impact of financial development on poverty reduction in Egypt. The paper also investigates whether financial development affects poverty via gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

This study uses the autoregressive distributed lag approach to estimate two specifications. The first is dependent on poverty by the ratio domestic credit to the private sector (percentage of GDP) and the second is dependent on the poverty by the ratio liquid liabilities to GDP or M3/GDP. The data are annual and cover the period from 1980 to 2015.

In long run, the study finds that relationship between economic growth and poverty is bidirectional. Financial development and poverty (household final consumption expenditure per capita) are complementary as bidirectional (in Granger sense). In short run, the study finds the bidirectional causality between financial development (real domestic credit to private sector per capita) and poverty reduction.

The findings suggest that governments should remove policies that impede the ability of banks to offer loan products or undermine the commercial incentive structure for banks or borrowers. It is crucial to enhance the role of specialized state-owned banks in financial intermediation.

Several attempts have been made to investigate the relationship between financial development and other macroeconomic variables, but few studies have examined the impact of financial development on poverty reduction. Furthermore, the majority of the previous studies are based on Asia and Latin America – affording Egypt very little or no coverage at all.

This study investigates the dynamic causality linkages between fiscal deficits and selected macroeconomic indicators in a panel of five East African Community countries.

The research design is based on panel cointegration tests, panel cross-section dependence tests, panel error correction-based Granger causality tests and panel impulse response functions.

Results show that there is long-run feedback causality among fiscal deficits and each of the variables include gross domestic product (GDP) growth, current account balance, interest rates, inflation, grants and debt service. Short-run Granger causality dynamics indicate that there is feedback causality between fiscal deficits and GDP growth; no causality between fiscal deficits and inflation; no causality between fiscal deficits and current account; no causality between fiscal deficits and interest rates; feedback causality between fiscal deficits and grants; and no causality between fiscal deficits and debt service. Impulse response functions show positive and significant impacts of current account balance, inflation and grants; negative and significant impacts of real GDP growth and lending rates; and insignificant effects of debt service.

While the study examines the dynamic causality between fiscal deficits and selected macroeconomic indicators in the East African Community, the analysis excludes South Sudan due to significant data limitations.

In light of the East African Community's aspirations to achieve convergence on key macroeconomic targets, including the fiscal deficit, this research provides novel insights on fiscal policy determinants and causality dynamics.

The dynamic relationships between fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables may have social implications for welfare, equitable growth and distribution of resources.

With a focus on the East African Community, this paper contributes to the literature on the macroeconomic determinants of fiscal deficits in regional economic communities.