Madagascar showed strong economic growth and low inflation under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) Arrangement. Executive Directors commended these developments, and stressed the need to restore fiscal discipline, improve governance, strengthen the business climate to encourage...

Since the conclusion of the last Article IV Consultation in October 2001, Georgia's macroeconomic performance has been encouraging. The 2003 Article IV Consultation and program discussions were held against the backdrop of protracted deviations from the IMF-supported program. Discussions with...

The draft 2004 budget passed by the assembly is consistent with the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). Achieving the programmed strengthening of the tax effort remains a challenge. On the expenditure side, the aim is to improve the anti-poverty and pro-growth orientation of public...

This 2005 Article IV Consultation highlights that following three years of sluggish economic growth, activity in Guatemala improved somewhat in 2004, with real GDP rising by 2¾ percent, but consumer price inflation drifted upward to more than 9 percent. Monetary policy is being geared to...

This report provides an assessment of fiscal transparency practices in Guatemala in light of the requirements of the IMF Code of Good Practices on Fiscal Transparency. The assessment reveals that Guatemala has progressed in certain important aspects of fiscal transparency. A variety of measures...

This 2002 Article IV Consultation highlights that the economic activity in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) is estimated to have slowed. Despite the use of the bump-up funds by some of the FSM’s four state governments to boost spending during FY2002, GDP is estimated to have grown...

The recent development literature stresses that countries that receive large revenues from natural resource endowments typically raise less revenue from domestic taxation, and that this creates governance problems because the lower domestic tax effort reduces the incentive for the public...

This paper proposes an integrated approach to fiscal policy analysis in oil producing countries (OPCs) geared towards addressing their unique and complex policy challenges. First, an accurate assessment of the fiscal stance in OPCs can be obscured by large and volatile oil revenue flows. Second,...

Unanticipated changes in commodity prices can generate significant movements in fiscal aggregates. This paper seeks to understand the dynamics of these fiscal movements in the context of transitory commodity price shocks using sample data from four CIS countries- two oil-producing and two...

Unlike conventional fiscal sustainability assessments, the Value-at-Risk approach developed in this paper explicitly captures the contribution of key risk variables to public sector vulnerability. In an illustrative application to Ecuador, the VaR approach confirms a significant risk of...