Application of VAR Models to Assess the Impact of Budget Expenditures on GDP Dynamics

This study uses the fiscal multiplier to evaluate the efficiency of government spending. The innovation of this work was the assessment of the VAR model of the Russian economy with time-varying coefficients and volatility parameters of macroeconomic indicators, which, unlike existing studies, made it possible to calculate the value of the budget multiplier separately for each year of the selected time interval (2005–2023) and describe its dynamics. Based on the calculation results, one can note a decrease in the efficiency of budget expenditures as their volume increases, which is especially noticeable during periods of crisis. The calculation of multipliers in the context of the main functional sections made it possible to identify the dependence of the efficiency of budget expenditures on their structure: the decrease in the efficiency of total expenditures in the period up to 2009 was mainly due to a drop in the return on social expenditures, and further dynamics were due to a rather rapid reduction in the positive impact on the economy from “power” spending.