Fiscal heterogeneity and economic growth: Evidence from dynamic panel models and clustering in the European Union

Description

This dataset contains cleaned and harmonized Eurostat data used to analyze the relationship between public spending composition, fiscal constraints, and economic growth across the 27 current EU member states over the period 1996–2023. Public spending composition plays a key role in shaping economic growth across EU member states. Health expenditure is associated with robust and state-dependent short-run growth effects. Education spending shows limited contemporaneous growth effects, suggesting longer-term transmission channels. Fiscal constraints and net lending conditions significantly influence the effectiveness of public expenditure. Strong cross-country heterogeneity in fiscal structures and growth dynamics characterizes the European Union.

Steps to reproduce

Data collection and reproducibility The data used in this study were obtained from publicly available Eurostat databases. The original datasets were downloaded manually from the Eurostat online data portal and subsequently cleaned by the author to retain only observations for the 27 current EU member states. Data cleaning involved the removal of non-EU countries and aggregates, as well as harmonization of variable definitions and time coverage across datasets. The cleaned datasets were stored in Excel format and used as inputs for the empirical analysis. Econometric estimations and clustering analyses were conducted using Python, applying standard panel data and clustering procedures. All variables are documented in accordance with Eurostat metadata, and the datasets can be merged by country and year to fully reproduce the results reported in the study.

Institutions

• University of Debrecen

  Hajdú-Bihar, Debrecen

Categories

Licence