Thursday, November 25, 2010

Euro Area T-R-O-U-B-L-E

I started looking into government revenue v. expenditure (taxes and spending) for the Euro area as a way of investigating why Ireland is in such big trouble. I see many are calling for Ireland to raise the corporate tax rate as a way of picking up their revenue to cover the expenditure. I wanted to see if the reason certain countries were in trouble were because of imbalances in revenue and expenditure. In other words, were governments spending themselves into trouble? So, I grouped EU countries into four categories: bilaterally by use of the Euro, and bilaterally by being above or below the average 10-year government bond yield for their currency grouping (Euro or non-Euro). So, there are four categories: on the Euro and below average debt yield (non-distressed); on the Euro and above average debt yield (distressed); on own currency and below average debt yield; on own currency and above average debt yield.

I collected data on total government revenue and expenditure for each country from the European Central Bank for 2000 - 2009. The graphs of the data appear below, following the order of the above list.





I think what we're seeing here is that there are move than a few countries that could be in trouble here. Some of these countries' imbalances started going up from 2008, which is clearly a drop in tax revenue due to economic slow-downs. However, some of the countries in trouble saw their imbalances either continuously high (above 1) are pick up prior to 2008. Ireland is one of these.

In a coming post, I'll look at the underlying driver of the imbalance. Mostly, I want to see if governments started spending more, or if tax revenue went down.

One thing is clear - there will be more trouble in the future.

3 comments:

  1. Governments tend to spend more in good times and when economic projections are rosy.

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  2. Many in the Euro zone are calling on Ireland to raise its corporate income tax rate from 12.5% to something higher. Officials claim the government needs the money. I hope you will show that it was gov’t spending and not lack of revenue that put them in the current predicament.
    Greece, which taxes corporations at much higher 28% tax rate, also needed a bailout, but I didn’t hear calls for raising its tax rate. Why then should Ireland? Hang tough, ye Irish.

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  3. Sam,

    Government spending keeps up, or gets ahead of, revenue. But, then when revenue drops off, it appears that spending just keeps going. Because, you know, governments just keep spending.

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