We consider public debt from a long-term historical perspective, showing how the purposes for which governments borrow have evolved over time. Periods when debt-to-GDP ratios rose explosively as a result of wars, depressions and financial crises also have a long history. Many of these episodes...

This paper benchmarks the efficiency of public expenditure in the social sectors in the Russian Federation relative to other countries and among the country''s regions. It finds that there is substantial room for efficiency gains, particularly in health care and social protection, although less...

In many countries the decentralization of spending responsibilities has outpaced the decentralization of revenue powers. Sub-national governments have then to rely on transfers from the center and borrowing to finance their spending. When this occurs, we find that the overall fiscal deficit...

Government spending on infrastructure has recently increased sharply in many emerging-market economies. This paper examines the mechanism through which public infrastructure spending affects the dynamics of the real exchange rate. Using a two-sector dependent open economy model with...

This paper focuses on the trade-off faced by governments in deciding the allocation of public expenditures between productivity-enhancing public infrastructures and utility-enhancing public consumption. From the modeling point of view, the paper augments a standard New Open Economy...

This paper addresses the potential effects on human capital accumulation and economic growth of the alternative compositions of public expenditures in the context of a computable dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations and heterogeneous agents in which altruistic parents...

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to Ugandan data to examine the welfare effects of alternative scenarios of government expenditure and tax financing. Two expenditure types are considered: social spending that affects human capital, and infrastructure expenditures...

Although conventional wisdom suggests that reducing military spending may improve a country’s economic growth performance, empirical studies have produced ambiguous results. This paper extends a standard growth model and estimates it using techniques that exploit both cross-section and...