"New Zealand's new Recognized Seasonal Employer program allows workers from the Pacific Islands to come to New Zealand for up to seven months to work in the horticulture and viticulture industries. One of the explicit objectives of the program is to encourage economic development in the Pacific....

"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...

The scope of this report is twofold. First, it documents skills gaps and mismatches and attempts to understand the reasons for them. Second, it provides a framework for thinking about skills development, drawing on international best practices, with the intent of stimulating further discussion....

"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...

"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...