The role of economics, politics and institutions on budget deficit in ASEAN countries

The paper examines the role of some determinants of economics, politics and institutions on the budget deficit volatility in some countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) such as Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The paper uses the fixed effects model (FEM) and the random effects model (REM) to investigate panel data of these countries in the period of 1990-2018. Moreover, the study also explores ordinary least square (OLS) to analyze time-series data for each country in the same period to make comparison among them. The economic data is collected from international financial statistics and world development indicators. The data on political variables are collected from International Country Risk Data Guide (ICRG). The empirical results both confirm that corruption and political stability are important indicators of budget deficit. Besides, the paper suggests authorities should pay more attention on improving the institutional setup of the economy in order to avoid high and unstable deficit. The findings offer new insight on the budget deficit in essence and suggest that the most important thing need to be done ahead is to strongly implement anti-corruption actions. By doing so, the status of budget deficit would be remarkably improved immediately.