Political Budget Cycle: A Sub-National Evidence from Pakistan

The use of public funds for re-election around election times is a long-debated subject in distributive politics. The empirical literature on the existence of the political budget cycles is mixed. This paper attempts to find the political budget cycle in a developing country context. We have used de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business cycle research Vol. 18; no. 3; pp. 343 - 367
Main Authors Nazir, Rabia, Nasir, Muhammad, Khawaja, Idrees
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cham Springer International Publishing 01.11.2022
Subjects
Econometrics
Economic Growth
Economics
Economics and Finance
Finance
Insurance
Macroeconomics/Monetary Economics//Financial Economics
Management
Public Finance
Research Paper
Statistics for Business
E62
Development planning
O23
H41
P16
distributive politics
Political budget cycle
H11
H77
Electoral politics
Public resources
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Summary:The use of public funds for re-election around election times is a long-debated subject in distributive politics. The empirical literature on the existence of the political budget cycles is mixed. This paper attempts to find the political budget cycle in a developing country context. We have used development spending data of 29 districts of the Punjab province of Pakistan over the period 2000–2017. The study has found significant evidence for the political budget cycle in our data. The cycles are not only systematic but also go beyond the election year. Spending is systematically reduced in post-election years and increased gradually in subsequent years.
ISSN:2509-7962
2509-7970
DOI:10.1007/s41549-022-00078-6