This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on fiscal balances in a panel of 142 countries over the period 1985-2015. Our instrumental variable strategy exploits the geographical diffusion of fiscal rules across countries. The intuition is that reforms in neighboring countries may...

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of approaches to assessing fiscal sustainability. It summarizes the general analytical background, focusing on the present value budget constraint, which is the benchmark against which solvency is determined, tests of sustainability...

We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

We construct the first comprehensive dataset of contingent liability realizations in advanced and emerging markets for the period 1990-2014. We find that contingent liability realizations are a major source of fiscal distress. The average fiscal cost of a contingent liability realization is 6...

Delegating fiscal decision making power to sub-national governments has been an area of interest for both academics and policymakers given the expectation that it may lead to better and more efficient provision of public goods and services. Decentralization has, however, often occurred on the...

Over the past three decades, large and persistent discrepancies between the annual change in public debt and the budget deficit, so-called stock-flow adjustments, were a prominent feature of debt dynamics in many economies. The aim of this paper is to investigate the underlying determinants of...

This paper estimates fiscal multipliers for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Using OLS panel fixed effects on a sample of six countries from 1990-2016, results indicate that GCC fiscal multipliers have declined in recent years which would make the on-going fiscal consolidation less...

Studies suggest that fiscal multipliers are currently high in many advanced economies. One important implication is that fiscal tightening could raise the debt ratio in the short term, as fiscal gains are partly wiped out by the decline in output. Although this effect is not long-lasting and...

This paper gauges the scope for market discipline and the effectiveness of the regional surveillance framework in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). The paper finds that the responsiveness of sovereign bond rates to governments' fiscal behavior in the regional financial market...

State-owned banks may help to soften the financing constraints of public sector entities and consequently become a factor that hampers fiscal discipline. Using a panel dataset, we find that a larger presence of state-owned banks in the banking system is associated with more credit to the public...