This Joint Staff Advisory Note (JSAN) highlights the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper–Country Development Strategy (PRSP–CDS) for the Kyrgyz Republic for 2007–10. The Kyrgyz authorities’ CDS for 2007–10 builds on the policy experience from the National Poverty...

The paper presents numerical simulations of various fiscal rules for oil-producing countries. Welfare implications are sensitive to the choice of the social welfare function, initial conditions, and non-oil growth prospects. The distribution of non-oil wealth is important for countries with...

This paper focuses on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) for the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. The National Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper represents the result of analyses of the country’s current situation as well as a set of proposals designed to rout the...

While public education is often intended to be progressive in its effects on income distribution, in reality its incidence is often skewed toward the rich. This paper argues that the extent of this bias is directly related to institutional weaknesses in governance. We present a simple dynamic...

There are several theories linking land inequality with aspects of economic development. Empirical work on these theories has attempted to establish a relationship between land inequality and institutions, financial development, and education. This research, though, has relied on measures of...

This progress report on Senegal’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) highlights that tax collection has been found to be effective as it attained the level foreseen in the high case scenario despite less favorable mobilization of PRSP resources than expected. More public investment...

This paper looks at the empirical record whether big infrastructure and public capital drives have succeeded in accelerating economic growth in low-income countries. It looks at big long-lasting drives in public capital spending, as these were arguably clear and exogenous policy decisions. On...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes sustaining potential growth in Aruba. As in the other Caribbean countries, there are growing concerns in Aruba about the slowdown in economic growth over the past two decades and the consequent tepid outlook for potential growth. Tackling such concerns...

Effective public investment requires governments to address the "recurrent cost problem" to ensure operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures are sufficient to sustain the flow of productive public capital services to private factors of production. Building on the model of Buffie et al...

This Selected Issues paper estimates both Guatemala’s potential output and output gap using a wide range of econometric techniques. The analysis suggests that Guatemala’s potential output growth is about 3.5 percent for the whole sample period and that the output gap is almost...