The Chinese pension system is highly fragmented and decentralized, with governance standards, pension fund management practices, their regulation and supervision varying considerably both across the funded components of the Chinese pension system and across provinces. This paper describes the...

The recent development literature stresses that countries that receive large revenues from natural resource endowments typically raise less revenue from domestic taxation, and that this creates governance problems because the lower domestic tax effort reduces the incentive for the public...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. A CROSS-SECTIONAL LOOK AT CENTRAL BANK ACCOUNTS -- III. SOURCES AND USES OF SEIGNIORAGE -- IV. WHAT DETERMINES CENTRAL BANKS' OPERATING EXPENDITURES? -- V. CONCLUSIONS -- SAMPLE COUNTRIES -- NOTATION -- VALUATION ADJUSTMENTS -- REFERENCES.

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN NATURAL RESOURCES AND GOVERNANCE IN BOTSWANA -- III. METHODOLOGY -- IV. EMPIRICAL RESULTS -- V. POLICY IMPLICATIONS -- VI. CONCLUSION -- REFERENCES.

The recent development literature stresses that countries that receive large revenues from natural resource endowments typically raise less revenue from domestic taxation, and that this creates governance problems because the lower domestic tax effort reduces the incentive for the public...

We compare and contrast the economic growth performance of Estonia and Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 in an attempt to understand better the extent to which the growth differential between the two countries can be traced to increased efficiency in the use of capital and...

Increases in German core inflation following the 2007 VAT hike were smaller than expected, leading to speculation about delayed inflationary effects. This paper argues to the contrary that price increases in advance of the VAT hike explain the small increase upon implementation. We find that...

This paper presents a novel approach to addressing VAT regressivity, by proposing the adoption of a progressive VAT: a single-rate, broad-base, VAT, whereby tax paid on consumption is re-paid to lower income households in real-time, at the moment of purchase. Such a system can effectively...

This paper studies the effect of the VAT threshold on firm growth in the UK, using exogenous variation over time in the threshold, combined with turnover bin fixed effects, for identification. We find robust evidence that annual growth in turnover slows by about 1 percentage point when firm...