The resumption of economic growth in Latin America is predicated on the successful restoration of fiscal discipline and stabilization. In restoring fiscal discipline, the mix of policy instruments should aim at maximizing efficiency in the use of domestic and foreign resources. Poverty...

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Belize grew faster than its regional peers. By the mid-2000s, however, economic growth had slowed down to the regional average. A vicious circle of low growth and increasing public debt has been clouding Belize's outlook. This paper applies a growth diagnostic...

This paper takes a fresh look at the current theories of structural transformation and the role of private and public fundamentals in the process. It summarizes some representative past and current experiences of various countries vis-a-vis structural transformation with a focus on the roles of...

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...

We find historical fiscal multipliers for Brazil around 0.5, larger than what existing literature typically identifies for the average emerging market. However, spending and public credit multipliers seem to have dropped to near zero since the global financial crisis, as the estimate for the...

This paper highlights that real interest rates in Brazil have declined substantially over time, but are still well above the average of emerging market inflation targeting regimes. The adoption of an inflation-targeting regime and better economic fundamentals (reduction in inflation volatility...

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...

Under a monetary dominant (MD) regime, the primary surplus adjusts to limit debt growth, permitting monetary policy to be conducted independently of fiscal financing requirements. In Brazil, some evidence favors an MD regime for 1995–97, but not for the decade of the 1990s as a whole. While...

We look into Brazil''s public sector accounts during the two administrations of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso: 1995-98 and 1998-2002. We underline the fact that the authorities'' attitude was as important as the pace of the structural reforms for understanding the dynamics of the public...