The key policy challenge for Turkey in the years ahead will be to enhance and consolidate the advances made since the nation’s 2000-01 economic crisis. Higher growth could reduce unemployment and raise living standards toward European Union levels. This paper reviews Turkey’s...

Country-specific factors prevent a strong linear relationship between the legislature's budgetary powers and the extent of its separation from the executive. Electoral and voting systems, bicameralism, constitutional and legal constraints, voluntary contracts of political parties, and...

The paper takes stock of the debate on the positive link between output volatility and the size of government-which reflects automatic stabilizers. After a survey of the literature, we show that the contribution of automatic stabilizers to output stability may have disappeared since the 1990s....

The paper revisits the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic stability. Two salient features of our analysis are (1) a systematic test for the government’s ambivalent role as a shock absorber and a shock inducer—removing a downward bias present in existing estimates of the...

This paper examines the merits of the British budget management system that was inherited in Anglophone African countries and which has changed substantially in the United Kingdom since the 1960s. It considers whether the disappointing budgetary performance in Africa is due to weaknesses in the...

Several features of Tanzania's budget system find their roots in the arrangements inherited from the United Kingdom. These include a legal framework that emphasizes accountability; a cabinet of ministers with strong budget decision-making powers; a parliament with very limited budget powers; and...