In this study, we assess the size of the government wage bill and employment in the member countries of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union and their implications for fiscal sustainability and the adequacy of public service delivery. Over the period 2005 to 2015 their wage bill (as a percentage...

Mexico's fiscal response to the pandemic has been modest compared to its peers, reflecting the authorities' desire to not issue new debt for spending. This approach, however, risks a more severe recession and a weaker economic recovery, with further costs in the future. Balancing the need for...

An equalization system ensures that subnational governments can provide similar level of public services at a comparable level of own tax-effort. This paper focuses on the importance of spending needs factors in the design of equalization transfers as well as special purpose transfers-and the...

This paper examines the sustainability of fiscal policy under uncertainty in three emerging market countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. For each country, we estimate a vector autoregression (VAR) that includes fiscal and macroeconomic variables. Retrospectively, a historical decomposition...

Despite Mexico’s recent remarkable progress in adjusting its fiscal and external accounts and in restructuring its economy, the recovery of growth has remained elusive. This paper reviews some aspects of Mexico’s recent performance and suggests that systemic adjustment uncertainty, and...

This paper uses a simple framework based on the government budget constraint to analyze the consistency of macroeconomic policies undertaken in Mexico during the period 1978 to mid-1991. It was found that the interaction between the actual implementation of economic policies and economic...

This paper uses the strategy and data of Blanchard and Perotti (BP) to identify fiscal shocks and estimate fiscal multipliers for the United States. With these results, it computes the cumulative multiplier of Ramey and Zubairy (2018), now common in the literature. It finds that, contrary to the...

This paper surveys the fiscal landscape of Latin America. It analyzes external and domestic factors that over the years led to the deterioration of the fiscal accounts. It also discusses difficulties that are encountered in pursuing a sound fiscal policy under inflationary conditions. Issues...

This paper considers the consequences of international financial market integration for national fiscal and monetary policies that derive from the absence of an international sovereign authority to define and enforce contractual obligations across borders. The sovereign immunity of national...