The scope for increasing public spending to meet Bulgaria’s development needs is limited by low revenue. Increasing the efficiency of spending is, therefore, crucial. This paper discusses how this can be achieved in four areas (public investment, social protection, health, and education). The...

Achieving France's medium-term fiscal targets will require significant expenditure efforts. This paper identifies areas where there is scope for increasing expenditure efficiency, with a view to achieving higher quality and more sustainable fiscal consolidation. The methodology is based on a...

Brazil's public-sector wage bill is comparatively high. It grows inertially and competeswith other spending. Rightsizing the wage bill could stimulate administrative efficiencyand bring more equity into a system where public employees earn more than private incomparable professions. Most...

Using a novel municipality-level panel dataset, this paper investigates the empiricalcharacteristics of vertical fiscal imbalances (VFIs) in Moldova over the period 2005–13. Theresults show that the extent of variation in VFIs across 898 municipalities can be explained bythe level of per...

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether expenditure decentralization has contributed to weakening fiscal performance in Europe. Using a panel of EU15 countries for the period 1995-2011, we estimate three econometric models and ask the following questions: (1) does the form of spending...

Equity and efficiency justifications are found for the Community`s Structural Funds which are discovered to be carefully targeted at depressed regions, albeit with some horizontal inequities. If Fund transfers displace national assistance, then they may be misallocated by being tied to regional...