"Regulation is purportedly enacted to serve specific social purposes. In reality, however, it follows a more complex political economy process, where legitimate social goals are mixed with the objectives of particular interest groups. Whatever its justification and objectives, regulation can...

"Political economy explanations for fiscal profligacy are dominated by models of bargaining among organized interest groups over group-specific targeted benefits financed by generalized taxation. These models predict that governments consisting of a coalition of political parties spend more than...

This note presents practical guidance on how to implement a framework for managing fiscal commitments from Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). It draws on specific regional operational experience and on World Bank Institute (WBI)'s wider thematic engagement with different partners worldwide. The...

Sub-national Governments play an important role in the Romanian public sector. In 2009, sub-national spending was equivalent to 8.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Romania has frequently adjusted its system for financing sub-national government over the last decade. These changes...

"The authors propose a "bottom up" approach to link public investment programs with a class of macro models recently developed to quantify Strategy Papers for Human Development (SPAHD) in low-income countries. The methodology involves establishing constant-price projections of investment outlays...

Policymakers in developing countries face multiple challenges related to climate change. To provide policymakers with reliable recommendations on a variety of climate related policies, the WBG has a diverse and complementary set of models. The analytics range from evaluating the aggregate,...

This note assesses recent macroeconomic developments in Belarus and presents a medium-term economic outlook for 2013-2016 in three scenarios. These scenarios are sensitive to underlying assumptions and are provided to illustrate the main macroeconomic policy choices, available to Belarus. The...

"The recent global financial crisis has shaken the confidence of developed and developing countries alike in the very blueprint of financial and macro policies that underlie the western capitalist systems. In an effort to contain the crisis from spreading, the authorities in the US and many...

"This paper relaxes some key assumptions in the probabilistic approach to fiscal sustainability. First, the authors identify structural breaks over the sample period used to estimate the covariance matrix of the shocks to the debt ratios. Second, the assumption of normality of the shocks is...