Natural resource revenues are an increasingly important financing source for public investment in many developing economies. Investing volatile resource revenues, however, may subject an economy to macroeconomic instability. This paper applies to Angola the fiscal framework developed in Berg et...

This paper examines the effect of stabilization funds on the volatility of government expenditure in resource-rich countries. Using a panel data set of 68 resource-rich countries over 1988–2012, the results find that the existence of stabilization funds contributes to smoothing government...

What are the potential benefits of increasing the taxation of a foreign extractive sector? This paper applies this question to the case of Guinea by using a multi-sector macro-inequality model with heterogeneous agents. We quantify the long-run equilibrium impact of additional taxation when the...

Starting in 2005, nontax revenue in Georgia is expected to rise significantly, in the form of transit fees for oil transported through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline. Transit fees for gas transported through the South Caucasus Pipeline are expected to start in 2007. This paper discusses...

Does the reliance on diversified tax structure enhance resilience to fiscal risks? This paper gives an answer to this question by proposing a new cross-country tax revenue diversification index (RDI). The RDI builds on the Theil index, and unlike the few existing tax diversification indices,...

This paper provides a comprehensive, updated picture of energy subsidies at the global and regional levels. It focuses on the broad notion of post-tax energy subsidies, which arise when consumer prices are below supply costs plus a tax to reflect environmental damage and an additional tax...

Budget revenue forecasts should be best estimates of expected receipts. Often they are not. This paper analyzes the rationale for overstated revenue forecasts and derives conditions for intentional biases. A theoretical model demonstrates that overstated revenue forecasts can be the result of...

To understand the cyclical movements of value-added tax (VAT) revenues in advanced economies, this paper analyzes changes in the C-efficiency ratio by decomposing it into changes in the compliance and policy gaps between 2000 and 2014. The results from a panel of EU member countries and Japan...

This paper uses a newly constructed revenue dataset of 35 resource-rich countries for the period 1992-2009 to analyze the impact of expanding resource revenues on different types of domestic (non resource) tax revenues. Overall, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between...

This paper assesses the implications of the use of oil revenue for public investment on growth and fiscal sustainability in Cameroon. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of such investment on growth and on the path of key fiscal indicators, such as...