The attached Joint Staff Assessment (JSA) of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) on Djibouti reviews poverty reduction objectives and strategies. The authorities invested considerable effort in building national ownership of the PRSP by strengthening the institutional framework. The...

This paper compares the pattern of macroeconomic volatility in 17 Latin American countries during episodes of high and low growth since 1970, examining in particular the role of policy volatility. Macroeconomic outcomes are distinguished from macroeconomic policies, structural reforms and...

The paper reviews the changing nature of intergovernmental fiscal relations between the provinces and the central government in China over the past two decades and provides an assessment of the success of previous reforms in meeting their objectives. Key existing weaknesses in the current system...

The objective of this paper is to present some early experiences of poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) from the PRGF-supported programs in the African Department. The paper illustrates that many staff country reports have taken a first step toward PSIA by making more explicit the links...

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) assesses the main exogenous and endogenous risks affecting the implementation of the strategy, including terms-of-trade shocks and absorptive capacity weaknesses. The medium-term expenditure framework identifies the priorities and needs of the country...

This paper provides a primer on benefit incidence analysis (BIA) for macroeconomists and a new data set on the benefit incidence of education and health spending covering 56 countries over 1960-2000, representing a significant improvement in quality and coverage over existing compilations. The...

How does fiscal policy fare in improving the underlying income distribution in Central America? We integrate the data from a number of existing tax and public expenditure studies for the countries in the region and find that the distributional effect of taxation is regressive but small. In...

The national poverty reduction strategy (NPRS) is the concrete manifestation of the government's commitment with respect to Chad's eligibility under the enhanced highly indebted poor countries (EHIPC) initiative. The program will work to create conditions for sustained growth by the end of the...