Estimating Substitution Elasticities between Private Consumption and Government Spendings in Iran and D8 Countries

Fiscal policies, especially government spendings, are considered as an important policy tool to influence real variables. The relationship between government spendings and private consumption has always been one of the concerns of policy makers. This paper investigates the relationship between government spendings and private consumption by estimating the intra-temporal and inter-temporal elasticity substitutions in D8 countries. For this purpose, time series data and the panel of private per capita consumption, public per capita spending and relative prices over the period of 1987 - 2012 are employed, and long-run relationship between the variables is estimated for all the countries by using the FM-OLS and the panel co-integration. The results of FM-OLS confirm the hypothesis of substitution between government spendings and private consumption in D8 countries (except Indonesia). Also, the DOLS results, too, indicate that there is such a relationship between private consumption and government spendings in the studied countries.