This paper considers whether institutional factors, in this instance electoral systems and procedures, affect Latin American countries' fiscal performance as measured by the size of the public sector, fiscal deficits, the size of the public debt, and the degree of procyclality of fiscal policy....

In this post-modern world of high capital mobility, countries are being disciplined by the anonymous capital market. One view of the situation -perhaps the prevalent view among economists- is that Wall Street gets into your hair because you are running an unsustainable economic program and...

What is the impact of political decentralisation in Latin America? This book considers the problems raised by political decentralisation in the region and identifies the challenges ahead. Political decentralisation tends to devolve a certain amount of financial responsibility to the sub-national...

The last Public Expenditure Review for Ecuador (PER) was produced in 1993. More than a decade later, the purpose of this report is to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with the World Bank's and Inter-American Development Bank's joint comprehensive account of their diagnoses and recommendations...

The Peruvian economy has exhibited remarkable growth in the past 20 years. Good tax and monetary policies, along with comprehensive structural adjustment, which has attracted substantial foreign investment, are regarded as the pillars of this success. Notwithstanding the advances experienced on...

This paper assesses the effects of total public debt (external and domestic) on social expenditure worldwide and in Latin America using an unbalanced panel of around 50 countries for the period 1985-2003. The most robust and important finding is that higher debt ratios do reduce social...

This Working Paper assesses the impact on investment of a reduction in corporate taxes and the impact on employment, labor formality, and growth of a reduction in non-wage labor costs in Colombia. First, and following Hall and Jorgensen (1967), we estimate an investment function, which depends...

Fiscal policy in Latin America has been guided primarily by short-term liquidity targets whose observance was taken as the main exponent of fiscal prudence, with attention focused almost exclusively on the levels of public debt and the cash deficit. Very little attention was paid to the effects...

The template presented in this note is concerned with the evaluation of the sustainability of total government debt, regardless of whether the creditor is a domestic or foreign resident, a public or private entity or the jurisdiction where the debt was issued (in the case of bonded debt). The...

Belize's 2008-2012 Country Strategy approved in June 2009 stated that the IDB would continuously monitor fiscal sustainability and calibrate its financing in accordance with changing country conditions. Rather than establishing specific sectors for IDB support, the Country Strategy identified...