António Afonso
Biographic Data
| ID | 1185924 |
|---|---|
| NAME | António Afonso |
| GIVEN NAMES | António |
| FAMILY NAME | Afonso |
| SIGNATURE | AFONSO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lisbon |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6926-2653 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 165 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Pressure Is on
We examine how geopolitical risks (GPR) affect fiscal (FS) and external sustainability (ES) across 27 European Union economies over 2001Q4–2022Q3. We apply a two‐step strategy: first, estimating time‐varying FS and ES coefficients using Schlicht's (2021) approach; second, analyzing their response to geopolitical risks through a panel framework with bootstrapped inference. Our results show that higher GPR systematically weakens both fiscal and ext…
The political economy of government spending
Does government spending efficiency improve fiscal sustainability
We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability and fiscal reaction function coefficients for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007–2020. To answer our research question, we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending as well as the coefficients of the cyclically adjusted primary balance as function of one-period lagged government debt. Ne…
Fiscal and current account imbalances
We investigate the bilateral relationship between government budget balances and current account balances for Germany and Portugal. We find that the response of the current account balance to the budget balance is greater in Portugal than in Germany. On the other hand, the response of the budget balance to the current balance is higher in Germany than in Portugal. In Germany and Portugal, a fiscal rules index has a negative impact on the current …
Introduction to Infer special issue on “new aspects of economic and financial integration”
This Special Issue (SI) gathers 13 papers presented at the 23rd INFER Annual Conference which took place in Lisbon, 8–10 September 2021, at ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management. The conference was organised by INFER (International Network for Economic Research), UECE (Research Unit on Complexity and Economics), and REM (Research in Economics and Mathematics). The papers of the SI focus on key topics in international macroeconomics, re…
Beyond borders
We assess the impact of geopolitical risk and world uncertainty on the sovereign debt risk of 26 European Economies during the period 1984–2022, through the implementation of OLS-Fixed Effects regressions and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). We find that geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty in border countries contribute to the rise of European country's sovereign risk as measured by 5- and 10-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and b…
A tale of government spending efficiency and trust in the state
This paper empirically links the efficiency and performance assessment of the general government, proxied by efficiency scores, to the trust in government. Government spending efficiency scores are first computed via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, relying on panel data and instrumental variable approaches, we estimate the effect of public sector efficiency on citizens trust on national governments. The sample covers 36 OECD countries betw…
Consumption patterns of indebted households
We have investigated the influence of fiscal instruments, notably taxes and government spending, on household consumption in two different samples and two measures of household debt to provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic. We used dynamic panel models and the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) approach for 24 and 32 advanced and emerging countries from 1995 to 2020. Our findings show that fiscal impulses increase private consumption. Ho…
Business Against Markets
Employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in Europe. This article, in contrast, argues that the preferences of employers vis-à-vis liberalization are heterogeneous and documents how employer organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal have resisted state-led reforms to liberalize collective bargaining during the Euro crisis. It shows that the dominance of small firms in the econom…
Local territorial reform and regional spending efficiency
We study the effect of a Portuguese structural reform, which reduced the number of parishes, on municipality spending efficiency between 2011 and 2016. We build a composite output indicator and use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. Then, we use a second-stage regression to evaluate the effect of the reform on municipal efficiency after controlling for socio-demographic, political and economic factors. Overall, we find …
Fiscal Reaction Functions Across the World
We estimate fiscal reaction functions for a panel of 173 countries using data between 1970 and 2014. Most notably, we assess the existence of non-Ricardian regimes, as postulated in the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL), or, contrarily, the possibility of Ricardian regimes. We find that governments have on average increased the primary balance as a response to higher previous government indebtedness, implying a Ricardian fiscal regime. In a…
Electoral Coalitions and Policy Reversals in Portugal and Italy in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis
This paper links patterns of deregulatory reforms and post-crisis reversals in Italy and Portugal with the electoral constituencies of political parties. Combining insights from the social coalitions and electoral behaviour debates, we link reform outcomes to the class set-up of the electorate in the two countries by using the class schema developed by Daniel Oesch. We find that governments in both countries reversed austerity measures in order t…
Assessment of efficiency in basic and secondary education in Tunisia
How party linkages shape austerity politics
Drawing on an analysis of austerity reforms in Greece and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onwards, we show how the nature of the linkages between parties and citizens shapes party strategies of fiscal retrenchment. We argue that parties which rely to a greater extent on the selective distribution of state resources to mobilize electoral support (clientelistic linkages) are more reluctant to agree to fiscal retrenchment because…
How to please voters without alienating friends? Parties, organised interests and advocacy coalitions in Swiss immigration policy
Do Fiscal Imbalances Deteriorate Sovereign Debt Ratings
Nous utilisons les estimations de notation souveraine de Afonso, Gomes et Rother [2009, 2011] pour examiner que les déséquilibres budgétaires récents expliquent les notations souveraines des États. À l’aide de données macroéconomiques et budgétaires passées (jusqu’en 2009) et des projections jusqu’en 2012, nous calculons la note qui devrait être attribuée à un certain nombre de pays de l’ ocde . Ces notes reflètent effectivement les déséquilibres…
Income distribution determinants and public spending efficiency
Fiscal policy responsiveness, persistence, and discretion
Dupuit, Pigou and cost of inefficiency in public services provision
Assessing and explaining the relative efficiency of local government
Measuring local government spending efficiency
AFONSO A. and FERNANDES S. (2006) Measuring local government spending efficiency: evidence for the Lisbon region, Regional Studies 40, 39–53. The expenditure efficiency of Portuguese local governments in 2001 was assessed using Data Envelopment Analysis for production frontier estimation. A composite municipal output indicator was constructed and input and output efficiency scores were computed for 51 Portuguese municipalities in the region of Li…
Fiscal Sustainability
The sustainability of fiscal deficits has been receiving increasing attention. The issue is paramount for the newly formed euro area, and that is one of the motivations of this paper. In order to assess the sustainability of budget deficits, cointegration tests between public expenditures and public revenues, allowing for structural breaks, are performed for the EU-15 countries for the 1970-2003 period. The »unpleasant« empirical results show tha…
Public sector efficiency
How party linkages shape austerity politics
Drawing on an analysis of austerity reforms in Greece and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onwards, we show how the nature of the linkages between parties and citizens shapes party strategies of fiscal retrenchment. We argue that parties which rely to a greater extent on the selective distribution of state resources to mobilize electoral support (clientelistic linkages) are more reluctant to agree to fiscal retrenchment because…
Assessing and explaining the relative efficiency of local government
Public sector efficiency
Electoral Coalitions and Policy Reversals in Portugal and Italy in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis
This paper links patterns of deregulatory reforms and post-crisis reversals in Italy and Portugal with the electoral constituencies of political parties. Combining insights from the social coalitions and electoral behaviour debates, we link reform outcomes to the class set-up of the electorate in the two countries by using the class schema developed by Daniel Oesch. We find that governments in both countries reversed austerity measures in order t…
Measuring local government spending efficiency
AFONSO A. and FERNANDES S. (2006) Measuring local government spending efficiency: evidence for the Lisbon region, Regional Studies 40, 39–53. The expenditure efficiency of Portuguese local governments in 2001 was assessed using Data Envelopment Analysis for production frontier estimation. A composite municipal output indicator was constructed and input and output efficiency scores were computed for 51 Portuguese municipalities in the region of Li…
Business Against Markets
Employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in Europe. This article, in contrast, argues that the preferences of employers vis-à-vis liberalization are heterogeneous and documents how employer organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal have resisted state-led reforms to liberalize collective bargaining during the Euro crisis. It shows that the dominance of small firms in the econom…
How to please voters without alienating friends? Parties, organised interests and advocacy coalitions in Swiss immigration policy
Assessment of efficiency in basic and secondary education in Tunisia
Income distribution determinants and public spending efficiency
Local territorial reform and regional spending efficiency
We study the effect of a Portuguese structural reform, which reduced the number of parishes, on municipality spending efficiency between 2011 and 2016. We build a composite output indicator and use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. Then, we use a second-stage regression to evaluate the effect of the reform on municipal efficiency after controlling for socio-demographic, political and economic factors. Overall, we find …
Does government spending efficiency improve fiscal sustainability
We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability and fiscal reaction function coefficients for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007–2020. To answer our research question, we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending as well as the coefficients of the cyclically adjusted primary balance as function of one-period lagged government debt. Ne…
A tale of government spending efficiency and trust in the state
This paper empirically links the efficiency and performance assessment of the general government, proxied by efficiency scores, to the trust in government. Government spending efficiency scores are first computed via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, relying on panel data and instrumental variable approaches, we estimate the effect of public sector efficiency on citizens trust on national governments. The sample covers 36 OECD countries betw…
Fiscal policy responsiveness, persistence, and discretion
Fiscal Sustainability
The sustainability of fiscal deficits has been receiving increasing attention. The issue is paramount for the newly formed euro area, and that is one of the motivations of this paper. In order to assess the sustainability of budget deficits, cointegration tests between public expenditures and public revenues, allowing for structural breaks, are performed for the EU-15 countries for the 1970-2003 period. The »unpleasant« empirical results show tha…
Public sector efficiency
Measuring local government spending efficiency
AFONSO A. and FERNANDES S. (2006) Measuring local government spending efficiency: evidence for the Lisbon region, Regional Studies 40, 39–53. The expenditure efficiency of Portuguese local governments in 2001 was assessed using Data Envelopment Analysis for production frontier estimation. A composite municipal output indicator was constructed and input and output efficiency scores were computed for 51 Portuguese municipalities in the region of Li…
Dupuit, Pigou and cost of inefficiency in public services provision
Assessing and explaining the relative efficiency of local government
Income distribution determinants and public spending efficiency
Fiscal policy responsiveness, persistence, and discretion
Do Fiscal Imbalances Deteriorate Sovereign Debt Ratings
Nous utilisons les estimations de notation souveraine de Afonso, Gomes et Rother [2009, 2011] pour examiner que les déséquilibres budgétaires récents expliquent les notations souveraines des États. À l’aide de données macroéconomiques et budgétaires passées (jusqu’en 2009) et des projections jusqu’en 2012, nous calculons la note qui devrait être attribuée à un certain nombre de pays de l’ ocde . Ces notes reflètent effectivement les déséquilibres…
How to please voters without alienating friends? Parties, organised interests and advocacy coalitions in Swiss immigration policy
How party linkages shape austerity politics
Drawing on an analysis of austerity reforms in Greece and Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2009 onwards, we show how the nature of the linkages between parties and citizens shapes party strategies of fiscal retrenchment. We argue that parties which rely to a greater extent on the selective distribution of state resources to mobilize electoral support (clientelistic linkages) are more reluctant to agree to fiscal retrenchment because…
Assessment of efficiency in basic and secondary education in Tunisia
Fiscal Reaction Functions Across the World
We estimate fiscal reaction functions for a panel of 173 countries using data between 1970 and 2014. Most notably, we assess the existence of non-Ricardian regimes, as postulated in the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL), or, contrarily, the possibility of Ricardian regimes. We find that governments have on average increased the primary balance as a response to higher previous government indebtedness, implying a Ricardian fiscal regime. In a…
Electoral Coalitions and Policy Reversals in Portugal and Italy in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis
This paper links patterns of deregulatory reforms and post-crisis reversals in Italy and Portugal with the electoral constituencies of political parties. Combining insights from the social coalitions and electoral behaviour debates, we link reform outcomes to the class set-up of the electorate in the two countries by using the class schema developed by Daniel Oesch. We find that governments in both countries reversed austerity measures in order t…
Business Against Markets
Employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in Europe. This article, in contrast, argues that the preferences of employers vis-à-vis liberalization are heterogeneous and documents how employer organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal have resisted state-led reforms to liberalize collective bargaining during the Euro crisis. It shows that the dominance of small firms in the econom…
Local territorial reform and regional spending efficiency
We study the effect of a Portuguese structural reform, which reduced the number of parishes, on municipality spending efficiency between 2011 and 2016. We build a composite output indicator and use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute efficiency scores. Then, we use a second-stage regression to evaluate the effect of the reform on municipal efficiency after controlling for socio-demographic, political and economic factors. Overall, we find …
Fiscal and current account imbalances
We investigate the bilateral relationship between government budget balances and current account balances for Germany and Portugal. We find that the response of the current account balance to the budget balance is greater in Portugal than in Germany. On the other hand, the response of the budget balance to the current balance is higher in Germany than in Portugal. In Germany and Portugal, a fiscal rules index has a negative impact on the current …
Introduction to Infer special issue on “new aspects of economic and financial integration”
This Special Issue (SI) gathers 13 papers presented at the 23rd INFER Annual Conference which took place in Lisbon, 8–10 September 2021, at ISEG – Lisbon School of Economics and Management. The conference was organised by INFER (International Network for Economic Research), UECE (Research Unit on Complexity and Economics), and REM (Research in Economics and Mathematics). The papers of the SI focus on key topics in international macroeconomics, re…
Beyond borders
We assess the impact of geopolitical risk and world uncertainty on the sovereign debt risk of 26 European Economies during the period 1984–2022, through the implementation of OLS-Fixed Effects regressions and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). We find that geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty in border countries contribute to the rise of European country's sovereign risk as measured by 5- and 10-year Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and b…
A tale of government spending efficiency and trust in the state
This paper empirically links the efficiency and performance assessment of the general government, proxied by efficiency scores, to the trust in government. Government spending efficiency scores are first computed via data envelopment analysis (DEA). Then, relying on panel data and instrumental variable approaches, we estimate the effect of public sector efficiency on citizens trust on national governments. The sample covers 36 OECD countries betw…
Consumption patterns of indebted households
We have investigated the influence of fiscal instruments, notably taxes and government spending, on household consumption in two different samples and two measures of household debt to provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic. We used dynamic panel models and the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) approach for 24 and 32 advanced and emerging countries from 1995 to 2020. Our findings show that fiscal impulses increase private consumption. Ho…
The political economy of government spending
Does government spending efficiency improve fiscal sustainability
We evaluate the impact of government spending efficiency on fiscal sustainability and fiscal reaction function coefficients for a panel of 35 OECD countries during the period of 2007–2020. To answer our research question, we first compute the magnitude of the responses of government revenues to changes in government spending as well as the coefficients of the cyclically adjusted primary balance as function of one-period lagged government debt. Ne…
The Pressure Is on
We examine how geopolitical risks (GPR) affect fiscal (FS) and external sustainability (ES) across 27 European Union economies over 2001Q4–2022Q3. We apply a two‐step strategy: first, estimating time‐varying FS and ES coefficients using Schlicht's (2021) approach; second, analyzing their response to geopolitical risks through a panel framework with bootstrapped inference. Our results show that higher GPR systematically weakens both fiscal and ext…
Economics (20 works) · Political science (14 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (13 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (10 works) · Macroeconomics (10 works) · Politics (8 works) · Efficiency Analysis Using DEA (6 works) · Fiscal policy (6 works) · Local Government Finance and Decentralization (6 works) · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact (6 works)