Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland face the serious challenge of adjusting not only to lower Southern Africa Customs Union (SACU) transfers because of the global economic crisis, but also to a potential further decline over the medium term. This paper assesses options for the design of...

This paper focuses on post-crisis fiscal priorities in the ASEAN-5 economies - Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Sound economic fundamentals and timely and forceful policy responses to the crisis, including fiscal stimulus, contributed to rapid economic recovery in the...

This paper empirically explores how fiscal policy (represented by increases in government spending) has asymmetric effects on economic activity at different levels of real interest rates. It suggests that the effect of fiscal policy depends on the level of real rates, since the Ricardian effect...

In recent years, fiscal performance in Central Europe has steadily deteriorated, in contrast to the improvement in the Baltics. This paper explores the determinants of such differences among countries slated for EU accession. Regression estimates suggest that economic and institutional...

Boom and bust phases in asset prices have become a pervasive feature of macroeconomic developments in many advanced economies. This paper studies fiscal policy during boom-bust phases in asset prices and draws several conclusions. First, expansions and contractions in economic activity during...

Debt relief and the scaling up of aid to low-income countries should allow for greater fiscal space for expenditure programs to create long-term growth and lower poverty rates. But designing a suitable medium-term fiscal framework that fosters a sustainable delivery of better public services and...

The paper analyzes the determinants of success of recent fiscal consolidations in the OECD countries as well as the short-run and long-run effects of fiscal adjustments on economic activity by looking at fourteen case studies, panel data for OECD countries, and the results of simulations using a...

Using a panel of 30 emerging market economies from 1997 to 2007, this paper investigates the determinants of country risk premiums as measured by sovereign bond spreads. Unlike previous studies, the results indicate that both fiscal and political factors matter for credit risk in emerging...

This paper considers long-term fiscal policy options in Norway, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, in light of the substantial expected increase in pension outlays. It compares the current fiscal rule, which targets a (central government structural) non-oil deficit equal to 4 percent of...

We propose a fiscal rule that fulfills a specific debt reduction objective while maintaining significant fiscal flexibility-two overarching concerns in Israel. Not unlike the Swiss "debt brake," the rule incorporates an error-correction mechanism (ECM) through which departure from the debt...