Brazil has had a long period of high inflation. It peaked around 100 percent per year in 1964, decreased until the first oil shock (1973), but accelerated again afterward, reaching levels above 100 percent on average between 1980 and 1994. This last period coincided with severe balance of...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...

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,...

Many countries in the Caribbean have been grappling with persistent fiscal imbalances and rising debt levels. The average debt to GDP ratio in the Caribbean in 2017 was 76.6 percent, higher than the negative debt-growth threshold of 60 percent of GDP. Also, the average fiscal deficit as a...

This paper assesses debt sustainability in Guatemala. Debt stability has been achieved at very low expenditure levels, at the expense of adequate provisioning of public goods and services and a widening gap in social development and infrastructure. Since fiscal outcomes are not independent from...

The understanding of the economic effect of formal institutional rules has progressed substantially in recent decades. These formal analyses have tended to take for granted that institutional arenas such as Congress are the places where decision-making takes place. That is a good approximation...

This paper evaluates whether fiscal and foreign exchange policy shocks can explain both credit and credit supply in Venezuela. Empirical evidence suggests that between 65 and 90 percent of credit growth is linked to the buildup of banks' deposits caused by the monetary effects of fiscal...

We exploit a hidden Markov model where inflation is determined by government deficits financed through money creation and/or by destabilizing expectations dynamics (expectations can potentially divorce inflation from fundamentals). The baseline model, proposed by Sargent et al. (2009), is used...

Tax expenditures are generally defined as those government expenditures carried out through tax legislation, regulations, and practices that reduce or defer taxes for some taxpayers. There is a general concern that the tax expenditures negatively affect the budget and tax policies, which in turn...