Issues of taxation and development, which have long been a central concern of the IMF, have attracted wider and renewed interest in the last few years. This paper reflects on three broad lessons of experience: that developing countries differ vastly in tax matters, and in ways that are less than...

High natural resource prices in recent years have resulted in sizeable increases in fiscal revenue for many resource-exporting countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, this revenue source is volatile, and arguably these countries should also rely on other forms of taxation to help fund public...

Revenue reforms can contribute to more inclusive, green, and sustainable growth in China. Relative to OECD economies, fiscal policy in China is less redistributive. Options for promoting more inclusive growth include improving the progressivity of labor taxes (individual income tax and social...

It is common for IMF-supported adjustment programs with low-income member countries (LICs) to project that they will facilitate FDI inflows. The main objective of this paper is to empirically examine this hypothesis. Using an unbalanced panel dataset for 73 low-income countries over the period...

Transaction-price residential (house) and commercial property price indexes (RPPIs and CPPIs) have inherent problems of sparse data on heterogeneous properties, more so CPPIs. In an attempt to control for heterogeneity, (repeat-sales and hedonic) panel data regression frameworks are typically...

Lockdowns imposed around the world to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic arehaving a differential impact on economic activity and jobs. This paper presents a new indexof the feasibility to work from home to investigate what types of jobs are most at risk. Weestimate that over 97.3...

I investigate the aggregate effects of R&D tax credits in the US. Because it subsidizes R&D activity and because credit rates vary between states, this policy has both spatial and dynamic effects on the economy. To address this issue, I construct an endogenous growth model with spatial...

Does fiscal decentralization improve health and educational outcomes? Does this improvement depend on the quality of governance? How do fiscal decentralization and governance interact? We answer these questions through an instrumental variable Tobit analysis of cross-country panel data. We find...

The end of the Cold War has ushered in significant changes in worldwide military spending. This paper finds that the easing of (1) international tensions, (2) regional tensions, and (3) the existence of IMF-supported programs are related to lower military spending and a higher share of...

The short answer: The size of the Russian State has not increased much in the last few years, but its economic footprint remains significant. Concretely, the state's size increased from about 32 percent of GDP in 2012 to 33 percent in 2016, not far from the EBRD's estimate of 35 percent for...