This paper discusses key findings of the Sixth Review Under the Three-Year Arrangement Under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) for Tanzania. Economic growth, inflation, and the external position have evolved in a manner consistent with program objectives, and the program has...

The growth rate of agriculture in Cameroon was estimated at 3.3 percent in 2006, compared with 2.7 percent in 2005. This is owing to increased activity in the food agriculture sector (4.3 percent) and in forestry and logging (4.0 percent). Livestock farming and fisheries, on the one hand, grew...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the propensity to consume out of income varies in a non-linear fashion with fiscal variables, and in particular with government debt per capita. Using data from eighteen OECD countries the paper examines whether there is any empirical evidence to support...

We estimate tax multipliers in a "Blanchard-Yaari" consumption model where Ricardian equivalence is broken because the private sector discounts the future at a faster rate than the real rate of interest. The model fits U.S. data since 1955 extremely well-entailing a discount wedge of around 20...

Given the large size of aggregate remittance flows (billions of dollars annually), they should be expected to have significant macroeconomic effects on the economies that receive them. This paper directly addresses the two main issues of interest to policymakers with regard to remittances--how...

This paper addresses two fundamental issues in indirect tax design. It first revisits the case for reduced rates on items especially important to the poor, establishing conditions under which even very crudely targeted spending measures better serve their interests. It then explores the welfare...