This paper analyses the determinants of public expenditures allocated to investment. We perform welfare analysis in an overlapping generations model with public consumption, public investment, debt and taxes. The optimal public investment share depends positively on the productive contribution...

Tax Burden, defined as the ratio of total tax revenues over personal income, is prominently used to summarize state tax policy. We analyze the empirical relationship between changes in Tax Burden and changes in state tax policy from 1987 to 2000 – as measured by states’ own forecasts of the...

This paper argues that the tradtitional way of gauging a country's fiscal policy stance by looking at government budget deficit or cyclically adjusted budget deficits is misleading in the case of China, since a lot of what usually would be considered fiscal policy is conducted via investment by...

Renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy. Because of modeling uncertainty, it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions. We find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy...

This paper contains a selective review of some of the key fiscal issues faced by transition economies. The twelve countries that provide the empirical background for this study have all been under Fund programmes for at least some of the time since they initiated their transitions from plan to...

This paper shows how the power of fiscal policy to affect consumption can vary depending on the level of public debt. At moderate levels of debt fiscal policy has the traditional Keynesian effects. Current generations of consumers discount future taxes because they may not be alive when taxes...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a surprisingly large expansion in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the...

This paper demonstrates that there is a robust empirical association between the extent to which an economy is exposed to trade and the size of its government sector. This association holds for a large cross-section of countries, in low- as well as high-income samples, and is robust to the...

Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider three questions: i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? ii) how well have historical debt management policies performed? and iii) how is that performance affected by...