Amongst a favorable economic environment, Ecuador's exceptional oil revenues have bolstered fiscal accounts. Several legal changes have created or modified funds or accounts aimed at saving, earmarking, or using oil-related revenues. This paper discusses oil-related fiscal policies,...

This paper estimates short-run and long-run elasticities of tax revenue with respect to GDP in eight Latin American countries using quarterly data. Taxes considered are corporate income tax (CIT), personal income tax (PIT), value-added tax (VAT), and overall taxes. Results indicate that long-run...

Este trabajo analiza el desempeño fiscal de Bolivia a la luz de la expansión y posterior contracción de los precios internacionales de los hidrocarburos entre 2005 y 2009. Se evalúa dicho desempeño desde el punto de vista de la posición estructural de la economía, es decir, descontando...

This paper provides an estimation of the size of income and demand automatic stabilizers in a representative sample of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The authors find that when a negative unemployment shock hits the economy, the size of income and demand automatic stabilizers...

This paper surveys the recent literature on the political economy of fiscal policy, in particular the accumulation of government debt. The authors examine three possible determinants of fiscal balances: opportunistic behavior by policymakers, heterogeneous fiscal preferences of either voters or...

This paper analyzes the aggregate effects of a revenue neutral fiscal-cum-social policy reform in a typical developing country that consists of two main changes: (1) the implementation of universal social insurance to replace the current dual social protection system (i.e., a reconfiguration of...

This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

This note discusses trade liberalization and trade taxes. The main issue should not be the reduction of trade taxes but of total tax revenue. By potentially changing the structure of the economy, trade liberalization will affect not just tax revenue but also the role of the state in the economy...

This book explains how economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes in Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance. It includes detailed country analyses which provide comparative knowledge about the workings of policymaking and budget...

The aim of this book is to provide policymakers in Latin America with the stylized facts of what works and what does not in decentralization policies and schemes, based on analysis of the recent experiences of several Latin American countries.