Dynamics between stock market movements and fiscal policy: Empirical evidence from emerging Asian economies

Pro-cyclical fiscal policy has raised concern in many emerging economies due to its adverse consequences to the economic activities. This paper takes a different approach to the issue, which aims to examine the bidirectional relationships between fiscal policy and stock market activities, using a panel of 12 emerging Asia-Pacific economies from 1990 to 2015. We estimate a variety of Panel Vector Autoregressive models to test for the consistence of the results. The empirical results show that fiscal policies in these countries tend to a pro-cyclical path in responding to stock market movements. The pro-cyclical behavior is found with both government expenditure and government revenue. On the other hand, a fiscal consolidation attempt has a rewarding effect on stock prices.