Electoral Cycles and Public Spending during the Pandemic / Michael Lokshin, Aylen Rodriguez Ferrari, Ivan Torre.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lokshin, Michael, author.

Torre, Ivan, author.

Ferrari, Aylen Rodriguez, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

COVID-19 (Disease).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (34 pages)

Place of Publication:

Washington D.C. : World Bank, 2022.

Summary:

This paper uses a newly assembled data set on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the longer is the time since the last election in a country-and thus the sooner the next election date-the larger is the share of the social protection pandemic budget allocated to social assistance and income protection and the lower is the share allocated to job retention schemes. The electoral cycle appears to have impacted the size of social assistance spending only in countries with high political competition. In this sense, countries with higher political competition experience stronger effects of political budget cycles.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Publisher Number:

10.1596/1813-9450-10214