Social safety nets protect citizens against hardship. By offering compensation, social safety nets may help overcome the political resistance to trade liberalisation and structural reform, but they can also weaken the incentives to work and save. Depending on their design, safety nets may also...

Exchange rates and price indices are constructed to test purchasing power parity between eight British North American colonial locations, five of whom issued their own fiat paper money. Purchasing power parity is then tested between these same locations after six became states politically and...

Major budgeting reforms have been initiated in a number of OECD countries in recent years. These reforms focus on giving spending agencies greater flexibility in using resources, in exchange for holding them responsible for achieving results. This publication examines how five Member countries...

In accordance with decisions made by the FDI, the OECD has initiated surveys on fiscal decentralisation for the purpose of providing international comparisons on the design of fiscal systems across levels of government. The FDI is a joint initiative of the OECD, the World Bank, USAID, the...

The purpose of this volume is to provide a reference book and a training manual for public administrators in the transitional economies, and in particular for officials with budgeting and policy-making responsibilities. The book is a follow-up to the Multicountry Seminar in Ljubljana (1-2 April...

In accordance with decisions made by the FDI, the OECD has initiated surveys on fiscal decentralisation for the purpose of providing international comparisons on the design of fiscal systems across levels of government. The FDI is a joint initiative of the OECD, the World Bank, USAID, the...

This paper considers the case for adjusting measures of the cyclically-adjusted fiscal balance for exceptional movements in the terms of trade for those countries where production of commodities is a substantial share of output. For such countries exceptional movements in commodity prices, such...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued fiat paper money as their principal internal medium of exchange. This system arose piecemeal across the colonies making the paper money creation story for each colony unique. It was true monetary...

The U.S. Congress issued paper money called Continental Dollars to finance the American Revolution. The story of the Continental Dollar is familiar to all -- a lot were issued and hyper-inflation ensued. However, the details of this story are less well known. Scholars even disagree over how much...