IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit
comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the
author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.
IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit
comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the
author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.
This paper examines how endogenizing technological progress in a multicountry macroeconometric model affects the analysis of fiscal policies. It uses an expanded version of the IMF’s multicountry model, MULTIMOD, in which total factor productivity (TFP) is endogenized as a function of domestic research and development (R&D) expenditures, R&D expenditures of trading partners, and trade. Compared with the standard version of the model with exogenous TFP, fiscal policies have much larger and long-lived effects on the domestic economy and on other countries.