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Fiscal policies are one of the most important instruments of government to guide the progress of the country's economic development. They find significant use in cases where the economy is experiencing a period of recession, such as the current one caused by COVID-19. This study aims to assess the multiplier effects that budget revision has on the economy for the case of Albania, and more specifically by referring to the initial and revised budget scenario for the year 2020 which is characterized by significant changes caused by the presence of COVID-19. Referring to the multipliers from the input-output tables (IOT) the total effect that the state budget brings to the economy for a certain year is derived. From this paper, it appears that the budget restructuring that takes place during the year does not take into account the multiplier effect in the economy, but is mostly done for specific purposes related to certain government functions. In this context, it is very important that various options during budget revision are evaluated, concluding with the option that has the highest returns for the economy.

The funding and payout system of social insurance has a significant impact on both the welfare of individuals and the national governance. Budget performance management can optimize fiscal resource allocation and enhance the quality of public services. The inclusion of the social insurance fund budget in the national budget in 2013 as one of China’s “four budgets” underscores the public value orientation it represents and shapes. The main challenge in enhancing the social insurance fund budget system lies in balancing the insurance attribute and the welfare attribute of social insurance, using an inclusive approach to achieve actuarial balance and budget balance, address potential imbalances, forecast and prevent future risks, and alleviate operational pressures. In the future, it is vital to raise the level of budget performance management for social insurance fund through scientific and reasonable performance evaluations, promote high-quality and sustainable development of China’s social security programs, and realize shared development in the new phase of Chinese modernization.

The post-pandemic economic reality seeks deep economic policies adjustment, including redesigning fiscal rules. This paper contributes to feeds the debate by investigating the side-effects of fiscal rules’ compliance on social welfare. It considers national Budget Balance Rules’ (BBR) compliance effects on social welfare proxies and the channel through which it operates between 2004 and 2015. Instead of fiscal rules strength or fiscal rules presence effectiveness, the study focuses on fiscal rules’ compliance to assess the impact of fiscal rules’ performance on social welfare, using a so-called “Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML)” approach (Chernozhukov et al. (2018)). The results show that governments seem to reallocate their spending to achieve both BBR’s compliance and economic objectives, with negative consequences on social expenditure. We also conclude to an increasing effect on social inequalities, suggesting that governments face a trade-off between fiscal rules’ compliance and social objectives. Thanks to the DML methodology, we also identify the key determinants of national BBR’s compliance, taking care of voter preferences by computing a new proxy variable through a Latent Factor Analysis. We conclude that voter preferences appear as a significant factor of BBR’s compliance, supporting that the Wyplosz (2012)’s bias may matter when assessing fiscal rules’ performance.

Sustainable budgets are important quality signals for the electorate. Politicians might thus have an incentive to influence tax revenue forecasts, which are widely regarded as a key element of national budget plans. Looking at the time period from 1996 to 2012, we systematically analyze whether national tax revenue forecasts in 18 OECD countries are biased due to political manipulation. Drawing on theories from the field of political economy, we test three hypotheses using panel estimation techniques. We find support for partisan politics. Left-wing governments seem to produce more optimistic, or less pessimistic, tax revenue forecasts than do right-wing ones. Contrary to the theoretical prediction based on the “common pool” problem, we find that more fragmented governments and parliaments tend to produce more pessimistic, or less optimistic, tax revenue forecasts. We find no empirical evidence that political business cycles play a role in tax revenue forecasts.

In this research, the intertemporal optimal management of subsidies offered by the environmental regulator and the dynamic conflict between two groups of economic agents involved in environmental quality are discussed. First the environmental model is examined in its optimal control management form with two state variables. The analysis of the improved model, inspecting the social planner's decision (policy) variable, the variable which influences not only environmental quality but the national budget stock, reveals that is dependent on the growth of the national budget stock. A negative growth rate leads to the long run saddle point equilibrium, while an incremental growth rate, but less than the model's discount rate, leads to an interesting complicated limit cycle equilibrium, for which under certain parameter values the orbit's phase portrait can be drawn. For the dynamic game model between the social planner and natural resource exploiters, the equilibrium conditions are examined. It is rather a richer than the point equilibrium for which the cyclical strategies have great importance. Therefore, the conditions for that rich equilibrium are found. As a continuation, the paper concludes that the equilibrium condition is that the players' discount rates are both greater than the national budget interest rate. Finally, the certain values of the equilibrium strategies and national budget stock are provided.

There are contradicting views regarding the casual nexus between a country's military spending and its nation's income inequality. Military spending is a critical component of government budget and can simply crowd out transfer payments, needed to improve income inequality. However, these payments can also stimulate a demand that can enhance the income prospects of the low-income earners. So, the association between military spending and income inequality is a vital question. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between military spending and income inequality for BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). We used panel data extracted from different sources such as World Bank's World Development Indicators and Penn World Tables. This is the first study that disaggregate the data and compute the results for the full sample (all BRICS countries taken together) and for sub-samples for countries with military expenditure of about 2% of GDP (India, china and Russia) and countries with military expenditure of less than 1% of GDP (that is, South Africa and Brazil). Thus, to unravel the influence of military spending on income inequality, pool mean group (PMG) or panel autoregressive distributed lag (PARDL) approach was applied for the period from 1990–2017 for BRICS nations. Overall, the empirical result for the pooled sample established an inverse relationship between military expenditure and income inequality. A percentage change in military expenditure result in income inequality reduction within the BRICS community. The estimated coefficient of GDP per capita, show that a percentage increase in GDP per capita in the long run will lead to about -0.209756 reduction in the level of income inequality and statistically significant at 1% level. When data was disaggregated to reflect the BRICS countries whose military expenditure was about 2% of the national budget (i.e. Russia, China and India), the study found that military expenditure had a negative influence on income inequality in the long run equation. Based on the outcome of this empirical work, we recommend for policy makers should focus more on the policies which can improve economic activities within the BRICS nations and ultimately reduce income inequality.

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year and may face incentives to rush to spend resources on low-quality projects at year's end. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the US federal government. Spending in the last week of the year is 4.9 times higher than the rest-of-the-year weekly average, and year-end information technology projects have substantially lower quality ratings. We also analyze the gains from allowing agencies to roll over unused funds into the next fiscal year.

Corporate income tax significantly affects the overall amount of government tax revenue. In spite of the attention being paid to many macroeconomic indicators (e.g. GDP, inflation, unemployment rate, etc.) influencing the total amount of tax revenues influence, we can hardly find empirical research focused on the microeconomic view where the data is based on of the individual financial statements and tax returns of companies. Although the study is very practical, it assesses the extent of the mutual co-dependence between the corporate income tax and assorted variables via non-parametric correlation. Moreover, it presents the impact of the corporate income tax on the national tax revenue of the Slovak Republic within the sample of evaluated taxpayers operating in agriculture, forestry and fishing in 2011-2015 from SK NACE Rev. 2 section “A” category of companies as legal entities ‒ Agriculture, forestry and fishing in 2011-2015. The study theoretically contributes to microeconomic-based view grounded on the adequate data of the legal entities, which were obtained from the corporate income tax returns provided by the Slovak Republic’s Financial Directorate.The authors found out a significant rate of dependency between selected evaluated variables in all groups in the reviewed period. This dependency, especially between total income and tax base, as well as between total income and corporate income tax, is an essential part of the accounting result determined in the double-entry bookkeeping. The reliance is also the basis for the income tax base calculation from which the adjusted tax base is declared, and subsequently the corporate income tax is calculated. Research results tell the corporate income tax revenue of our sample makes up for, largely, 1.6% of the total tax revenue flowing to the Slovak national budget. Therefore, a set of recommendations was put forth in order to strive for a maximization of these tax revenues within the agricultural sector.

The financing of church life in the Slovak Republic is still a topical theme. Cofinancing church activities from the national budget has not always garnered a positive response among the laity. The current scheme of financing Slovak churches developed out of the cooperative model of a relationship with the state. Its roots are found in the reformation period of Emperor Joseph II (1780–1790). The traditional church financing scheme was cleverly used by the communist regime that came to power in Czechoslovakia after the end of the Second World War. The author demonstrates, using specific documentation from archived materials, the limitations to religious freedom that resulted from the scheme of the state taking on the financing of church life.

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies may be restricted to take the form of decision trees based on a limited set of easily observable individual characteristics. We propose a new approach to this problem motivated by the theory of semiparametrically efficient estimation. Our method can be used to optimize either binary treatments or infinitesimal nudges to continuous treatments, and can leverage observational data where causal effects are identified using a variety of strategies, including selection on observables and instrumental variables. Given a doubly robust estimator of the causal effect of assigning everyone to treatment, we develop an algorithm for choosing whom to treat, and establish strong guarantees for the asymptotic utilitarian regret of the resulting policy.