This paper analyzes the impact of decentralization on overall fiscal performance in the European Union, taking into account fiscal institutional arrangements. We find that spending decentralization has been associated with sizably better fiscal performance, especially when transfer dependency of...

This paper investigates economic, political, and institutional constraints to fiscal policy implementation in sub-saharan Africa. We find that planned fiscal adjustments or expansions are less likely to be implemented the larger they are, the more inaccurate the growth forecasts they are based...

This paper documents cyclical patterns of government expenditures in sub-Saharan Africa since 1970 and explains variation between countries and over time. Controlling for endogeneity, it finds government expenditures to be slightly more procyclical in sub-Saharan Africa than in other developing...

This paper presents, for the first time, multi-dimensional indices of the quality of budget institutions in low-income countries. The indices allow for benchmarking against the performance of middle-income countries, across regions, and according to different institutional arrangements that...

How effective was public investment in stimulating the Japanese economy during the economic stagnation of the 1990s? Using a dataset of regional public investment spending, we find that investment multipliers were higher than for public consumption, although they were relatively low and...

The paper explores the macroeconomic effects of three public pension reforms, namely an increase in retirement age, a reduction in benefits and an increase in contribution rates. Using a five-region version of the IMF‘s Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal model (GIMF), we find that...