Assessing Fiscal Sustainability with Panel Unit Root, Cointegration, and Granger Causality Tests: Evidence from the Broader Groups of Countries

Abstract

The question of fiscal sustainability of countries has become one of the central topics in economic policy, especially in times of increasing public debts. One way to assess fiscal sustainability is to examine compliance with the intertemporal budget constraint, which involves testing the stationarity of government revenues and expenditures, the primary budget balance, and the first differences of public debt. Part of this approach includes testing cointegration and causality among different pairs of variables. Under this approach, the paper is focused on both first- and second-generation panel unit root tests, cointegration, and Granger causality test. This paper focuses on assessing the fiscal sustainability of four panels of countries divided by continents: Europe, Asia and Oceania, Africa, and Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America. It has been found that fiscal sustainability is present in all the broader groups of countries considered but in a weak form. Fiscal sustainability was confirmed when considering a constant in calculations, while deviations were observed among groups of countries when both a constant and trend were considered. The study serves as a starting point for a more extensive analysis of fiscal sustainability. For more accurate findings, it would be necessary to categorize countries into smaller and economically more homogeneous groups and analyze them using other fiscal sustainability methods as well.