Yuan-Hong Ho and Chiung-Ju Huang
Elections, Checks and Balances, and Government Expenditures Empirical Evidence for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
1348 - 1353
2012
6
6
International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/12201
https://publications.waset.org/vol/66
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Previous studies on political budget cycles (PBCs)
implicitly assume the executive has full discretion power over fiscal
policy, neglecting the role of checks and balances of the legislature.
This paper goes beyond traditional PBCs models and sheds light on
the case study of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan over the 19882007
periods. Based on the results, we find no evidence of electoral impacts
on the public expenditures in South Korean and Taiwan&039;s
congressional elections. We also noted that PBCs are found on
Taiwans government expenditures during our sample periods.
Furthermore, the results also show that Japans legislature has a
significant checks and balances on governments expenditures.
However, empirical results show that the legislature veto player in
Taiwan neither has effect on the reduction of public expenditures, nor
has the moderating effect over Taiwans political budget cycles, albeit
that they are statistically insignificant.We suggest that the existence of
PBCs in Taiwan is due to a weaker systemof checks and balances. Our
conjecture is that Taiwan either has no legislative veto player or has
observed low compliance to the law during the time period examined
in our study.
Open Science Index 66, 2012