Latin American countries exhibit a significant gap in infrastructure stocks, due to low and in many cases inefficient public investment, which is furthermore not compensated by private sector projects. In this paper we analyse trends in public and total infrastructure investment in six large...

This paper surveys the evolution of macroeconomic policy, in the New Zealand context, from the beginning of the end of the Great Inflation of the 1970s/1980s, through to the current recovery from the Great Recession brought on by the Global Financial Crisis. The 30 or so years since the late...

This paper examines the extent to which projected aggregate tax revenue changes, in association with population ageing over the next 50 years, can be expected to finance expected increases in social welfare expenditures. It uses projections from two separate models, dealing with social...

New Zealand’s fiscal policy framework has been in place for nearly 20 years. At its core is a set of principles around maintaining prudent levels of public debt and running fiscal surpluses on average over time. This framework, combined with an extended period of economic growth, contributed...

Existing methodologies for estimating a government’s structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

This paper analyses fiscal policy for several economies in Latin America, from the early nineties to the 2009 crisis. We present original estimates of cyclically-adjusted public revenues for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay implementing the standardised...

I present a simple estimated model of the New Zealand economy which is used to assess the sensitivity of the impact multiplier and output losses associated with fiscal consolidations to uncertainty over model parameters. I find that, in normal times, the fiscal multiplier can be expected to lie...

Is the social contract in Latin America broken? Many authors have suggested this is the case, given the high levels of inequality, the low levels of taxation and the low quality of public services observed in the region. This paper analyses empirically the relationship between fiscal policy,...