How Big are Fiscal Multipliers in Latin America?

Download or read book How Big are Fiscal Multipliers in Latin America? written by Jorge Restrepo and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2020-01-31 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper uses the strategy and data of Blanchard and Perotti (BP) to identify fiscal shocks and estimate fiscal multipliers for the United States. With these results, it computes the cumulative multiplier of Ramey and Zubairy (2018), now common in the literature. It finds that, contrary to the peak and through multipliers reported by BP, the cumulative tax multiplier is much larger than the cumulative spending one. Hence, the conclusions depend on the definition of multiplier. This methodology is also used to estimate the effects of fiscal shocks on economic activity in eight Latin American countries. The results suggest that the fiscal multipliers vary significantly across countries, and in some cases multipliers are larger than previously estimated.