There is scant empirical economic research regarding the way that Latin American governments efficiently allocate their spending across different functions to achieve higher growth. While most papers restrict their analysis to the size of government, much less is known about the composition of...

Accountability & Transparency: Cornerstones of Democratic Governance -- Will Ghana Avoid the resource Curse? -- Tackling Cultural Corruption -- Perceptions of Societal Corruption and Levels of Trust in Government -- Citizen Engagement in Fostering Democratic Governance in Rwanda --...

The fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) has been active for 30 years, and the interest in this theory grew with the recent global surges in inflation and government spending. This study applies the FTPL to 37 OECD countries for 2020-2022. The theory's centerpiece is the government's...

This paper studies whether changes in the composition of public spending affect the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations. Based on a sample of 44 developing countries and 26 advanced economies during 1980-2019, results show that while fiscal consolidations tend to be on average,...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of two key expenditure categories (current and public investment spending) during the different phases of the business cycle (good times and bad times). Anecdotal evidence suggests that policymakers usually cannot resist the temptation of spending more...

To explain the fact that government spending and tax policy are procyclical in emerging and developing countries, we develop a model for the joint behavior of optimal tax rates and government spending over the business cycle. Our set-up relies on financial frictions, which have been shown to be...

Economic theory and econometric evidence support the thesis that the displacement of government expenditures on public goods by subsidies to private goods inhibits the performance of the farm sector. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the mix of expenditures related to...

Despite the widespread debate about crime in Brazil and the alarming increase in homicides in recent years, few studies have analyzed or exposed evidence of the impact of public security spending on deterring violence in the country. This may be due to issues of endogeneity when estimating the...

This paper finds that per capita municipal spending on public services is strongly and non-linearly correlated to urban population density. Optimal expenditure levels for municipal services are achieved when densities are close to 9,000 residents per square kilometer. In this study of...

Do voters punish governments that introduce fiscal "austerity" measures? If so, does voter response vary according to the design (composition) of fiscal adjustments? What determines the timing of fiscal consolidations? The empirical literature on the political economy of fiscal adjustments,...