Hong Kong SAR''s government faces the dual challenges of volatile revenue and medium term spending pressures arising from a rapidly aging population. Age-related spending pressures raise long-run sustainability concerns, while revenue volatility creates risks to service provision, possibly...

Trinidad and Tobago is experiencing an energy boom stronger than the ones in 1970s and 1980s. The main fiscal policy challenge is to ensure that the increased revenues from the ultimately exhaustible resources are used in a way that protects the competitiveness of the nonenergy sector, builds...

This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on...

This Selected Issues paper for the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) underlies the recent upward trend in inflation that was heavily influenced by external factors. The policy mix to achieve price stability requires effective control of money supply and fiscal restraint. As...

The Fund has long played a lead role in supporting developing countries' efforts to improve their revenue mobilization. This paper draws on that experience to review issues and good practice, and to assess prospects in this key area

This paper argues that the development of human capital in the public sector should be an important ingredient in any proposed set of “second-generation” reforms for Africa. In the post-colonial era the quality of governance has seriously declined, and the stock of human capital in the...

Increasing public debt vulnerabilities in low-income developing countries (LIDCs) have heightened the need for fuller and more transparent accounting of public sector debt (PSD). The framework for reporting on public sector debt is sound. But there is room for LIDCs to further improve their...

This paper pursues several objectives. First, it presents a sketch of a positive (or real-world) theory of public sector intervention. Second, it analyzes in some detail the activity of the public sector in nine market economies of developing Asia and relates this activity to the growth of the...

We study the determinants of employment and wages in the public sector, using a new set of panel data for 34 LDCs and 21 OECD countries from 1972–992, by estimating equations suggested by an efficiency wage model. We find that government employment is positively associated with the relaxation...

This Selected Issues paper is a wide-ranging survey of the conditions for, and obstacles to, the growth in Mexico. It frames the issue of Mexico’s growth record, and presents the paper’s prior assumptions and approach. It highlights the main observations and conclusions emerging from the...