The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1) the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and...

The Islamic Republic of Iran has committed itself to substantial trade and market reform in its Third Five-Year Development Plan. It started out with nontariff barriers on all products, a dual exchange rate regime with the market rate more than four times the official rate, and domestic energy...

Using novel data on unemployment benefits and active labor market policies in 191 countries in 2019 and 2020, this paper investigates the patterns of unemployment benefits and active labor market policies and their relationship with labor market outcomes. This study is unique in that it covers a...

This paper uses a three-round 4,000-household panel from Andhra Pradesh together with administrative data to explore short and medium-term poverty and welfare effects of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Triple difference estimates suggest that participants significantly increase...

Prevailing practices in evaluating workfare programs have ignored the disutility of the type of work done, with theoretically ambiguous implications for the impacts on poverty. In the case of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, past assessments have relied solely on household...

Trade does not stimulate growth in economies with excessive business and labor regulations. The authors examine the effect of openness on growth using cross-country regressions in both levels and changes. Results from the levels regressions imply that increased openness is associated with a...

Who benefits from public spending? Who bears the burden of taxation? How desirable is the distribution of net benefits from the operation of a tax-benefit system? This paper surveys basic concepts, methods, and modeling approaches commonly used to address these issues in the context of fiscal...

This paper identifies the international credit channel of monetary policy by analyzing the universe of corporate loans in Mexico, matched with firm and bank balance-sheet data, and by exploiting foreign monetary policy shocks, given the large presence of European and U.S. banks in Mexico. The...

The goal of this paper is to understand better, at the empirical level, how public spending contributes to growth by focusing on both the level and composition of public spending, in connection to the dynamics of GDP per capita growth. It attempts to answer two specific questions: (a) What are...