Government revenue, government expenditure, and temporal causality: evidence from China

Dissatisfied with little evidence provided on various hypotheses concerning the revenue-expenditure relation in China, this paper is an empirical endeavour to fill the gap through a battery of econometric tests for causality based on vector error-correction and vector autoregression models. A more comprehensive testing strategy for unit roots and cointegration has been suggested, and a bidirectional causality pattern has been found in China's government finance. The paper thus concludes that attempts simply to change revenue or expenditure or both without taking into account of the interdependence between the two may be counter-productive, and the effects on aggregate demand of government debt-financing in the presence of inflation may not be as detrimental as some economists would expect.