Debt relief and the scaling up of aid to low-income countries should allow for greater fiscal space for expenditure programs to create long-term growth and lower poverty rates. But designing a suitable medium-term fiscal framework that fosters a sustainable delivery of better public services and...

According to U.N. estimates, low-income countries will have to increase their annual public spending by up to 30 percent of GDP to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), raising the question of whether they can do it all. This paper develops a new metric of fiscal space in low-income...

The paper discusses the effectiveness of independent fiscal institutions -- or fiscal councils -- in taming the deficit bias that emerged in the 1970s. After a review of the main theoretical arguments and recent trends about fiscal councils, we develop a stylized model showing how a fiscal...

This paper studies the impact on growth, welfare, and government debt of fiscal reform packages in a theoretical model drawing together three key features of the endogenous growth literature: (i) investment in technology (in the form of human capital) offsets diminishing marginal productivity of...

The paper examines the joint impact of inflation targeting (IT) and fiscal rules (FR) on fiscal behavior and inflation in a broad panel of advanced and developing economies over the period 1990-2009. The main contribution of the paper is to show that, as suggested by the theoretical literature,...

The global surge in independent fiscal councils (IFCs) raises three related questions: How can IFCs improve the conduct of fiscal policy? Are they simultaneously desirable for voters and elected policymakers? And are they resilient to changes in political conditions? We build a model in which...

This paper identifies leading indicators of fiscal crises based on a large sample of countries at different stages of development over 1970-2015. Our results are robust to different methodologies and sample periods. Previous literature on early warning sistems (EWS) for fiscal crises is scarce...

This paper employs a two-country New Keynesian DSGE model to assess the macroeconomic impact of the changes in monetary policy frameworks and the fiscal support in the U.S. and euro area during the pandemic. Moving from a previous target of “below, but close to 2 percent” to a formal...