Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Mar 7:1-31.
doi: 10.1057/s41294-023-00210-0. Online ahead of print.

Political Budget Cycles in Early Versus Regular Elections: The Case of Serbia

Vladan Ivanovic  1   2 , Endrit Lami  3   4 , Drini Imami  2   5
Affiliations

Political Budget Cycles in Early Versus Regular Elections: The Case of Serbia

Vladan Ivanovic et al. Comp Econ Stud. .

Abstract

The paper analyses Political Budget Cycles in the context of a young post-communist democracy, Serbia. The authors deploy well-established methodological (time series) approaches to examine the general government budget balance (fiscal deficit) in conjunction with elections. The findings suggest that there is clear evidence of higher fiscal deficit prior to elections-however, this is the case only for regular (scheduled) elections and not so for snap (early called) elections. The paper contributes to the PBC literature by revealing different incumbent behaviour in regular versus early elections, thus highlighting the importance of distinguishing between these types of elections in the domain of PBC research.

Keywords: Budget balance (deficit); Early elections; Political budget cycles; Regular elections; Serbia.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Inflation adjusted monthly fiscal balance in RSD billion (left-hand panel); inflation and seasonally adjusted monthly fiscal balance in RSD billion (right-hand panel). Source: National Bank of Serbia–seasonal adjustment by the authors
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Akaike, H. 1973. Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle. In 2nd international symposium on information theory, eds. B.N. Petrov, and F. Csáki (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest), 267-281.
    1. Akhmedov A, Zhuravskaya E. Opportunistic political cycles: Test in a young democracy setting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2004;119(4):1301–1338. doi: 10.1162/0033553042476206. - DOI
    1. Alesina A, Roubini N. Political cycles in OECD economies. The Review of Economic Studies. 1992;59(4):663–688. doi: 10.2307/2297992. - DOI
    1. Alesina, A., and J. Sachs. 1986. Political parties and the business cycle in the United States, 1948–1984 (No. w1940). National Bureau of Economic Research.
    1. Alt JE, Lassen DD. Transparency, political polarization, and political budget cycles in OECD countries. American Journal of Political Science. 2006;50(3):530–550. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00200.x. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources