Fiscal Policy Spillovers through Trade Openness

This paper studies whether trade openness reduces the domestic fiscal multiplier, but increases the impacts of foreign fiscal shocks, i.e., the spillover effect, as suggested by theory. Using annual data from the period of 1970 to 2011, for 179 developed and developing economies, we show that domestic fiscal shocks are less potent in more open economies, while foreign (rest of the world) fiscal shocks are more potent in more open economies.