"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...

"A range of alternative empirical definitions of informal activity have been employed in the literature. Choice of definition is often dictated by data availability. Different definitions may imply very different conceptual understandings of informality. In this paper the authors investigate the...

The World Bank is sharing the seventh edition of the Economic Update of Madagascar, which presents our analysis for the period up to the beginning of October 2017 and provides our medium-term economic outlook. Despite a challenging start due to two climatic shocks, we project growth at 4.1...

This report reviews South Africa's recent economic and social developments. It underlines that South Africa's current economic rebound may not be sustained if the fundamental factors undermining its growth potential are not boldly addressed. This includes in particular income inequality, which...

The Economic Update (SEU) evaluates the recent (2016-17) growth performance and macroeconomic policies in Senegal, thus providing a basis for the policy dialog with the Government and other stakeholders. The first section of the Economic Update evaluates the drivers of growth and the...