欧洲央行-财政政策与通货膨胀：政府债务非线性的解释（英）

Working Paper Series Fiscal policy and inflation: accounting for non-linearities in government debt Cristina Checherita-Westphal, Tom Pesso Disclaimer: This paper should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank (ECB). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the ECB. No 2996 AbstractThis paper investigates the interplay between discretionary fiscal policy and inflation inthe euro area, emphasizing the role of public debt levels in modulating this relationship. Itexplores how fiscal expansions or contractions influence inflationary pressures, particularlyunder varying debt conditions. The analysis reveals that fiscal policy’s effect on inflationis non-linear, with debt levels significantly affecting the inflationary outcome of fiscalmeasures. High debt levels tend to amplify the inflation response to fiscal expansions,a finding that holds under multiple analytical frameworks and robustness checks. Thispaper contributes to the empirical literature by highlighting the critical role of fiscal policy,especially in high-debt environments, and its implications for inflation dynamics in the euroarea.Keywords: fiscal policy, public debt, inflation, local projections.JEL Codes: E31, E62, H63ECB Working Paper Series No 29961Non-technical summaryLike other advanced economies, the euro area faced high inflation over the past few years.Notwithstanding the recent decline, especially in energy prices, inflation has proven morepersistent than initially expected.These developments have triggered renewed discussionsabout the role of monetary and fiscal policies, as well as their interaction, in shaping inflation.In this context, our paper adds to the empirical literature on the impact of fiscal policy oninflation, a topic that is still unsettled. Its contribution is to analyse the impact of discretionaryfiscal policy on inflation in the euro area, using a relatively novel dataset for this purpose, andaccounting for non-linearities with respect to the level of public debt. Furthermore, interactionsbetween fiscal and monetary policy are explored as we control for non-linear effects of fiscalstimulus depending on the level of interest rates (and the position in the economic cycle). To thebest of our knowledge, this is the first paper to explicitly analyse possible non-linear effects offiscal stimulus shocks on inflation depending on the level of debt and accounting simultaneouslyfor several state dependencies.We use local projections, under two alternative non-linear methods, for a panel of 12 (initial)member countries of the euro area over the period 1999-2022. In terms of identification for thefiscal policy shock, we use three strategies. Most importantly, we employ in the baseline modela proxy for total discretionary fiscal policy measures from the Eurosystem Working Group ofPublic Finance (WGPF), based on a narrative, measure-by-measure approach on the revenueside and benchmarking the growth