This paper addresses the problems of defining and measuring government subsidies, examines why and how government subsidies are used as a fiscal policy tool, assesses their economic effects, appraises international empirical evidence on government subsidies, and offers options for their reform....

Over the past three decades, public spending on infrastructure, as a share of GDP, has been on the decline worldwide. Although the link between infrastructure investment and economic growth is not yet fully understood, the quality of infrastructure clearly affects a country's productivity,...

Against the background of Mexico's persistently high degree of inequality, this paper analyzes the country's experience with pro-poor policies over the last decade. A number of important government initiatives, implemented since the mid-1990s, have aimed at improving distributional equity...

This paper discusses the role of government expenditure policies in the decline in aggregate output in European transition economies. It is argued that there is little evidence for the hypothesis that more expansionary expenditure policies would have helped to mitigate the output decline. While...

This paper analyzes the determinants of currency substitution in Bolivia in the period following the 1984/85 hyperinflation. We find that expected exchange rate depreciation and actual interest rate differentials between boliviano and dollar deposits in the Bolivian banking system are...

This paper argues that the IMF's traditional monetary conditionality-a ceiling on net domestic assets of the central bank and a floor on its net international reserves-should be adapted in IMF-supported adjustment programs with countries which have a framework of explicit inflation targets for...

It is commonly agreed that economic policies, including budgetary policies, can have potentially strong distributional effects. Traditional economic analysis held that economic policies affected the income distribution primarily through their impact on the rate of growth. More recently, it has...

This paper addresses an apparent lack of economic theory in the analysis of multilateral development bank (MDB) behavior. A simple comparative statics model that is adapted from the credit union literature is used to predict potential areas of conflict, agreement, and indifference between MDB...

Poland's economy rebounded dramatically in 1992-93, several years after the nation embarded on a comprehensive program of economic transformation. This paper describes Polan's steps in the areas of public finance, monetary policy and financial sector reform, trade and exchange rate policy, and...