This Public Expenditure Review analyzes trends in revenues, expenditures and development outcomes over the past 10 years. Its main findings are that, since the late 1990s, the Philippines has been caught in a low-revenue, low-expenditure trap and that the current level of public revenues is not...

Since 1987, Ireland has developed five "social partnership" agreements, with the latest launched in February 2000 called the "Program for Prosperity and Fairness"1. This program outlines a comprehensive set of economic and social objectives finalized over extensive consultations among the...

This report brings together three budget notes that assess Kenya's fiscal capacity to respond to global crisis and deliver shared growth without compromising macroeconomic stability. The report is organized into three notes. The key messages from this analysis point to areas where Kenya's fiscal...

Although the State of Ceara, in Brazil, is a model of good economic, and fiscal performance given its poverty status, recent analysis show poverty remains severe, in spite of significant reductions over the last decade. The combination of good governance, and sound fiscal management, industrial...

"The recent global financial crisis has shaken the confidence of developed and developing countries alike in the very blueprint of financial and macro policies that underlie the western capitalist systems. In an effort to contain the crisis from spreading, the authorities in the US and many...

"Political economy explanations for fiscal profligacy are dominated by models of bargaining among organized interest groups over group-specific targeted benefits financed by generalized taxation. These models predict that governments consisting of a coalition of political parties spend more than...

"This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, the authors identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of normality of the shocks is...

"The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1) the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and...