The Behavior of Fiscal Policy in Indonesia in Response to Economic Cycles

The current general wisdom regarding fiscal policy in response to fluctuations in economic cycles is to adopt countercyclical strategies: contractive during a boom to avoid overheating the economy and expansive during a recession to stimulate economic activity. This paper attempts to investigate the practical behavior of fiscal policy in Indonesia in response to economic cycles to establish whether it follows general fiscal wisdom (countercyclical) or amplifies the cycle (procyclical). An error correction model (ECM) and an alternative model to deal with the possible endogeneity problem are utilized. This paper shows that fiscal policy in Indonesia tends to be procyclical. Observations of some other ASEAN countries, namely Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, indicate that Singapore could be the only country in ASEAN that is able to implement a countercyclical fiscal policy