This paper presents twelve budget institutions that can support planning and delivery of credible fiscal strategies in the fiscal policy-making process. The resulting framework is applied to seven low-income countries and the status of their budget institutions compared to the G-20 advanced and...

Fiscal impulse measures are used in the WEO and elsewhere to indicate the changing impact of the budget on the economy. Such measures are intended to provide more accurate indications of whether the budget is becoming more or less expansionary than would just observing moments in the actual...

In Jordan, a system of general food subsidies became untenable in budgetary terms, with a sharp devaluation of the dinar in the late 1980s. A shift from a general subsidy system to limited rations would greatly reduce budgetary costs and minimize adverse effects on the poor. To reduce subsidies,...

The U.S. national savings rate has declined in the 1980s, with both public and private components falling. This paper discusses that decline and whether a policy response is needed. The drop in the private savings rate appears to reflect factors not easily reversible by policy and increases in...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

Trade liberalization affects not only the external sector, production, and prices, but also the fiscal balance, through changes in tariff revenue, and through the sensitivity of the budget to induced changes in the exchange rate and in the level and distribution of income and employment. This...

In many countries, the activities of public enterprises have an important fiscal impact. While the precise nature of this impact is often obscured, it is important that it be reflected in measures of overall fiscal activity. The paper is intended to raise and clarify some of the issues involved...

While federal credit programs are varied in form, their fiscal and economic effects arise primarily from the same source—each program’s subsidy component. Recent credit reform proposals would make control of credit subsidies the primary focus of budgetary efforts. By subjecting these...

Conventional fiscal accounting methodologies do not appropriately account for governments’ noncash policies, such as their contingent liabilities. When these liabilities are called, budget costs can be large, as evidenced by the United States’ saving and loan crisis. In general, deficit...

This paper considers the implications of the prospective aging of the U.S. population for the social security system and concludes that the large and growing cashflow surpluses of the social security trust funds should be saved to help insulate living stands against this change. A number of...