Subsequent to the economic difficulties of the 1980s, many Latin American governments reluctantly began to introduce market-oriented reform measures. In many cases, the new measures were adopted only as a means of participating in debt-relief programs such as the Brady Initiative. In no case,...

A theoretical model of the inflationary process in Nigeria is developed using monetary aggregates, the exchange rate, and the implicit cost of holding idle cash balances. Parameter estimation is accomplished using quarterly data for 1970:1 through 1993:4 and a nonlinear ARMAX procedure....

An overview of modeling and forecasting methodologies for price trends and other macroeconomic variables in Latin America is provided. Five approaches are reviewed within the time series and econometric traditions from which they are selected. Each method is reviewed within the context of data...

Florida is one of the most internationally oriented regional economies in North America. During the 1990s, trade and investment flows in Florida changed substantially. This was partly due to new international trade agreements and partly due to improved economic performances observed in major...

El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico jointly form one of the largest border economies in the world. They have grown substantially in recent years and face a number of policy challenges. Topics reviewed include population, employment, incomes, retail trade, international commuting...

This paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics. Using this method we construct time-series of tax rates for large industrial countries. The method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines...

Recent quantitative studies predict large welfare gains from reducing tax distortions in a closed economy, despite costly transitional dynamics to more efficient tax systems. This paper examines transitional dynamics and gains of tax reforms for countries in a global economy, and provides...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a "tormented insurer," trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid cuts in payments to private agents despite large fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, average public debt-GDP ratios decline as the variability of...

This paper looks at fiscal solvency and public debt sustainability in both emerging market and advanced countries. Evidence of fiscal solvency, in the form of a robust positive conditional relationship between public debt and the primary fiscal balance, is established in both groups of...

What are the macroeconomic effects of tax adjustments in response to large public debt shocks in highly integrated economies? The answer from standard closed-economy models is deceptive, because they underestimate the elasticity of capital tax revenues and ignore cross-country spillovers of tax...