We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-section of developing and advanced countries, and discuss the implications for countries in the Middle East, North Africa, Caucasus and Central Asia....

This paper assesses the state and resilience of corporate and banking sectors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in a "higher-for-longer" interest rate environment using granular micro data to conduct the first cross-country corporate and banking sector stress tests for the MENA region....

Personal income taxes (PITs) play little or no role in the Middle East and North Africa, often yielding less than 2 percent of GDP in revenue-with the exception of few North African countries. This paper examines how PITs have evolved in recent decades, and what they might look like in the next...

This paper analyzes corporate vulnerabilities in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan (MENAP hereafter) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic shock. Using a sample of nearly 700 firms from eleven countries in MENAP, we assess the non-financial corporate (NFC) sector's liquidity and solvency...

This paper reviews some broad principles of fiscal coverage, building on cross-country experience. It discusses the level of coverage that would be appropriate to conduct good quality fiscal analysis, while striking the right balance between the costs and the benefits of expanding the coverage....

The analysis in this paper suggests that import and export volume elasticities are markedly lower in oil-exporting Middle East and Central Asian countries than in non-oil countries in the region. A key implication of this finding is that a real appreciation of the exchange rate in oil-exporting...