Política fiscal óptima:el estado de la cuestión

Resumo

This paper presents the state of art in optimal fiscal policy, focusing on the more promising research lines in this topic. In particular, we show the main results on how the government must implement optimal fiscal policy in different frameworks: from static to dynamic stochastic settings and, from infinite horizon to overlapping generations models. For a commonly used structure of preferences (time separable and homothetic), results are not very different among the several settings. In general, results such as the optimal zero tax rate on capital income (but with high initial tax rates) and the optimality of the uniform taxation on labor income and consumption, are usual in different frameworks. However, new research lines have arisen, trying to obtain results empirically more plausible, with model specifications that avoid time inconsistency and the indeterminacy of the state-contingent optimal fiscal policy.