Does the COVID19 pandemic change the relationship between government expenditures and economic growth in Azerbaijan?

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the Government's capital and current expenditures on economic growth in Azerbaijan. The estimation strategy of the research consists of two directions. First, all estimation approaches were used for the period of 2005Q1-2019Q4. The estimated model for this period is called Model 1. Second, the model which is called Model 2 was estimated for whole period of 2005Q12021Q1. This approach allows comparing the role of the Government expenditures on non-oil economic activity in normal times and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Azerbaijan. Estimations show that coefficients characterizing the impact of Government current expenditures and capital expenditures on non-oil economic growth are almost the same for both periods. Therefore, we can state that COVID-19 pandemic did not affect the structure of the relationship between Government expenditures and non-oil economic growth. Results show that 1 percent increase in capital and current expenditures of state budget increases the real non-oil GDP by 0.10 and 0.40 percentage points, respectively. Accordingly, both capital and current expenditures of the state budget have positive impact on the real non-oil GDP growth for the both periods. This is in contrast to findings in the literature, which argue that increasing current expenditures financed by tax hikes lead to a lagged decrease in private investment, having an overall negative impact on economic growth. We attribute this opposing finding to the Azerbaijani state budget revenue system, which is financed by transfers from the State Oil Fund (Stabilization Fund). Thus, large government investment and social projects mostly rely on non-tax sources. Therefore, we argue that positive impact of capital and current expenditures of government budget on non-oil GDP seems plausible for Azerbaijan. Another result of our estimation is that expansion of economic openness accompanied by non-oil economic growth plunge in Azerbaijan. We interpret this phenomenon with very low share of non-oil export, where openness is mostly caused by increase in import volume.