This paper discusses possible medium-term public debt targets for India, based on evidence from the economic literature on prudent levels of public debt and the feasibility for the country to meet a particular target over the next 5-6 years. While recognizing the challenges in determining an...

The effectiveness of recent fiscal stimulus packages significantly depends on the assumption of non-Ricardian savings behavior. We show that, under the same assumption, fiscal deficits can have worrisome implications if they turn out to be permanent. First, if they occur in large countries they...

The Czech Republic has embarked on an ambitious tax reform and expenditure package to bring the deficit sustainably below 3 percent, and intends to reduce the deficit to 1 percent of GDP by 2012. To address the long-term fiscal challenge due to population aging, pension reform proposals are also...

Despite recording double digit growth since 2000, Armenia's tax-to-GDP ratio has been fairly stable at about 14½ percent. This paper catalogues a range of factors that may account for Armenia's stubbornly for tax collection by benchmarking Armenia's tax-to-GDP against some comparator...

In the context of the current tax policy debate in the United States, this paper reviews and discusses some of the main recurrent themes, as well as some of the most important tax reform proposals put forward over the past two decades. It finds that although there seems to be widespread...

We estimate tax multipliers in a "Blanchard-Yaari" consumption model where Ricardian equivalence is broken because the private sector discounts the future at a faster rate than the real rate of interest. The model fits U.S. data since 1955 extremely well-entailing a discount wedge of around 20...

The paper reviews Slovakia's comprehensive reforms to its taxation and welfare systems in 2004, including the introduction of a flat-rate income tax and single-rate value-added tax (VAT), and linkage of social benefits to participation in labor market programs. Though revenues following the...

Building on the substantial progress made in establishing fiscal systems consistent with market economies, the paper identifies priorities for further fiscal structural reforms among the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Activities of extra budgetary accounts and quasi-fiscal...

This paper provides an overview of the key economic factors that shape tax policy reform in many high-income countries, developing countries, and/or transition economies. The paper describes and evaluates global and regional developments with respect to tax rates and revenue ratios over the last...

This paper utilizes an open-economy New Keynesian overlapping generations model to assess the extent to which fiscal policy, along side an inflation-forecast-based monetary policy, could enhance macroeconomic stability in Colombia. The model simulations indicate that, in addition to stabilizing...