Fiscal Expenditure Multipliers in South Africa: is there a crowding-out effect?

Abstract

Returning an economy to fiscal solvency from episodes of large deficit requires efficient composition of national spending. It is for this reason that empirical inquiry concentrated on disaggregated expenditure components has gained relevance in the recent past. This paper employs an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) to establish the size of fiscal expenditure multiplier. This paper uses time series data of disaggregated fiscal components ranging from 1982 to 2020. The results show positive but smaller (less than one) multipliers for all the disaggregated fiscal expenditure variables in the long run. Most importantly, the results show that the public sector wage bill, which takes the largest share of overall government expenditure, has a smaller multiplier compared to the rest of the expenditure items, indicating a possible crowding out impact. Effective management of the public sector wage bill and efficient budget allocation must be prioritized both in the long-run and short-run. This can be achieved by prioritizing growth-enhancing expenditures whilst keeping the public sector wage bill moderate.