The sovereign debt default and the linkages from banking and currency crisis have been rarely explored in the crisis literature. This study attempts to dive into this unexplored area by applying panel data binary choice model on a sample with 20 emerging countries having monthly observations for...

The Paper is one of the first attempts to compute cyclical and structural deficits for a set of countries candidate to accession to the EU. Three main results are derived: first, the high deficits observed in candidate countries in recent years have a structural nature. Second, the fiscal stance...

We investigate the effect of changes in unemployment insurance (UI) rules in Hungary on the outflow rate from the UI register. Existing claims to UI are `grandfathered' in Hungary when UI rules change - new rules are applied only to new claims and existing claims continue to be administered...

Despite the fact that theoretical research on opportunistic political cycles is very intuitive and well developed, empirical literature has found fairly weak evidence of opportunistic political cycles. This Paper tests the theory in a decade-old democracy – Russia. We find strong evidence of...

Falling output and living standards have pushed countries in transition from the socialist system to re-consider how best to target public resources on those in need. The paper investigates the workings of a new social assistance benefit in Uzbekistan, the largest of the former Soviet Central...

The paper analyses the revenue-raising, distributional and incentive effects of the personal tax system in Hungary from the start of the transitional tax reforms of 1988, and develops methods for estimating marginal indirect taxes. It evaluates the distributional impact of revenue-neutral...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden "unofficial" activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse official...

Fiscal reform is central to the process of transforming a Soviet-type economy to a market economy, for with the emergence of a significant private sector, the boundaries between the public and private sectors needs to be more sharply drawn. The paper draws lessons from the experience of the...

Motivated the European debt crisis, we construct a tractable theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms under limited commitment. The government of a sovereign country which has fallen into a recession of an uncertain duration issues one-period debt and can renege on its obligations by...

Many countries have failed to use natural resource wealth to promote growth and development. They have been damaged by volatility of revenues, have failed to save a sufficiently high proportion of their resource revenues and failed to make high return investments to support diversification of...