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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of total factor productivity (TFP), institutional quality, and interactive variable between them on economic growth in 13 low-middle income countries in Asia for the period 2000-2018. The paper uses the difference Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to explore the dataset provided by the World Bank. The empirical results show that TFP and the interactive variable positively impact on the economic growth, while the institutional determinants have a negative influence. The negative effect is explained by the weak institutions in these low-middle income countries. The findings of the study suggest two points. First, the government should continue to improve TFP, which is associated with the application of technical advances, technological innovations, improvement of management methods, and skilled workers. Second, far more important, is that the authorities should pay special attention to implement institutional reform and strengthen the governance in the future. The successful experiences from Japan, Korea and Singapore will help other governments in Asian low-middle income countries to build developmental state. Probably, the developmental state actively interfere in the market to promote and realize the development goals. By doing so, these economies might overcome the so-called “middle-income trap”.