Measuring fiscal space in emerging market and developing economies

Development Financing Emerging Markets & Developing Economies International Financial Institutions

发展融资 新兴市场和发展中经济体 国际金融机构

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) defines fiscal space as “room in a government’s budget that allows it to provide resources for a desired purpose without jeopardizing the sustainability of its financial position or the stability of the economy.” Loosely, it is the gap between what a government spends and the point at which it struggles to finance that spending or service its debt.

国际货币基金组织（IMF）将财政空间定义为“政府预算中的空间，使其能够为预期目的提供资源，而不损害其财务状况的可持续性或经济的稳定性。”宽松地说，它是政府支出与政府难以为支出融资或偿还债务的程度之间的差距。

Developing countries are routinely urged to conserve fiscal space in uncertain times, building buffers against future shocks.

人们经常敦促发展中国家在不确定时期保留财政空间，为未来的冲击建立缓冲。

But governments can also create future fiscal space by investing in prevention and in economic transformation that yields high returns.

但政府还可以通过投资预防和产生高回报的经济转型来创造未来的财政空间。

The climate adaptation literature is full of microeconomic examples of a stitch in time saving nine: mangrove restoration, drought-resistant seeds, urban green space, early-warning systems, dual-use public buildings.

气候适应文献充满了“一针一线”的微观经济例子：红树林恢复、抗旱种子、城市绿地、预警系统、两用公共建筑。

Similarly, the economics of the clean energy transition offer significant opportunities for growth.

同样，清洁能源转型的经济学也提供了重要的增长机会。

The list of present-day expenditures that head off much higher future costs grows as climate and disaster shocks become more frequent.

随着气候和灾害冲击变得更加频繁，当前能够避免未来成本大幅上涨的支出清单也在不断增加。

Whether incremental spending adds to fiscal space or subtracts from it is therefore largely a matter of judgment about the impact of the spending.

因此，增量支出是增加还是减少财政空间，很大程度上取决于对支出影响的判断。

Such judgment also has to anticipate how others will react.

这种判断还必须预测其他人将如何反应。

Identical expenditures in two countries can have opposite implications for fiscal space depending on how much confidence lenders place in the government’s ability to identify and execute the investment and to respond to unanticipated shocks.

两个国家的相同支出可能会对财政空间产生相反的影响，具体取决于贷款人对政府识别和执行投资以及应对意外冲击的能力的信心程度。

To help policymakers make sound judgments on how their spending decisions might impact fiscal space, a model is needed to rigorously quantify the implications for fiscal space of a range of decisions.

为了帮助政策制定者对其支出决策可能如何影响财政空间做出正确判断，需要一个模型来严格量化一系列决策对财政空间的影响。

There are two parts to such a decision: first, whether the marginal returns to a proposed public investment are high enough to justify the spending; second, whether the macroeconomic conjuncture of public debt, revenues, and GDP can accommodate higher levels of debt-financed public investment.

这一决定有两个部分：首先，拟议公共投资的边际回报是否足够高，足以证明支出的合理性；其次，公共债务、收入和国内生产总值的宏观经济结合是否能够容纳更高水平的债务融资公共投资。

One of us has previously addressed the first issue on marginal returns .

我们中的一个人之前已经讨论过关于边际回报的第一个问题。

That work finds the returns appear to be high, compared with the cost of capital, in most developing countries, even those with relatively weak institutions and limited complementary human capital.

这项研究发现，与资本成本相比，在大多数发展中国家，即使是那些机构相对薄弱、补充性人力资本有限的国家，回报似乎也很高。

In this paper, we turn to the question of macroeconomic or fiscal sustainability.

在本文中，我们转向宏观经济或财政可持续性问题。

This is a rather loose term that we try to put on an empirical footing by creating a model that aggregates a number of readily observable, publicly available indices.

这是一个相当宽松的术语，我们试图通过创建一个模型来建立实证基础，该模型汇总了许多易于观察的公开指数。

Campos, Cysne, and Castro (2026) have built such a model and applied it to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Campos、Cysne 和 Castro（2026）建立了这样一个模型，并将其应用于拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的国家。

This paper adapts that framework to extend coverage to 144 emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs).

本文对该框架进行了调整，将覆盖范围扩大到 144 个新兴市场和发展中经济体 (EMDE)。