Following a benchmarking exercise, we estimate the spending required to reach satisfactory progress in the Sustainable Development Goals in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors in Brazil. We find that there is room for savings in education (up to 1.5 percentage point of GDP) and...

The fiscal policy response to the COVID-19 shock in most LAC countries was much larger than during the GFC, suggesting fiscal space was not as tight as expected. We argue that it is feasible and desirable, though not without risks, to embark in a more gradual consolidation path than currently...

The paper describes a semistructural macrofiscal approach to simulating and forecasting macroeconomic policies. Our canonical model is adapted to Cambodia and we demonstrate its application with an illustrative scenario of macroeconomic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Complemented with...

Would population aging affect the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus? Despite the renewed focus on population aging, there are few empirical studies on the output effects of fiscal policy in aging economies. Our study fills this gap by analyzing this issue in OECD countries. We find that, as...

What do we know about the output effects of fiscal policy in low income countries (LICs)? There are very few empirical studies on the subject. This paper fills this gap by estimating the output effects of government spending shocks in LICs. Our analysis-based on the local projection method-finds...

A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the macroeconomic and fiscal effects of public wage reductions. We find that accounting for the type of government spending is crucial for its macroeconomic implications. Although...

This paper assesses the optimal setting of fiscal spending and foreign exchange rate intervention policies in response to volatile foreign aid, in a small open economy model that incorporates typical features of low-income countries. Within a class of policy rules, it jointly considers the...

This paper discusses the short- and medium-term fiscal implications of government wage bill spending. Working with a sample of 137 advanced, emerging and low-income countries, we use a panel VAR approach to identify differences in the dynamic behavior of revenues, nonwage expenditures, and the...

Government debt in many small states has risen beyond sustainable levels and some governments are considering fiscal consolidation. This paper estimates fiscal policy multipliers for small states using two distinct models: an empirical forecast error model with data from 23 small states across...

This paper examines the role of tax policy reforms in enhancing fiscal shock smoothing in a panel of 13 OECD economies during the period 1980-2017. The results suggest that tax reforms, in particular those that broaden the tax base, significantly enhance the ability of fiscal policy to mitigate...