Using a panel dataset of 34 emerging market countries for the period 1990-2002, we examine the roles of various economic, political, and institutional variables in determining fiscal effort, as proxied by the primary surplus. We find that while fiscal effort increases, as expected, with the...

The study documents evidence of a ""quality effect"" of financial liberalization on allocative efficiency, which is measured by the dispersion in Tobin''s Q across firms. Based on a simple model, the authors predict that financial liberalization, by equalizing access to credit, reduces the...

Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good—for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we...