This paper explores the determinants of public employment across the world and finds that it is negatively associated with country size (by population) and positively associated with the income level. The findings show that a country's openness to trade is positively associated with public...

This paper discusses different empirical tests of public sector solvency and applies them to a sample of 18 OCED countries. Provided that the government solvency constraint need to be imposed, these tests develop from the idea of verifying whether the intertemporal budget constraint of the...

We provide a model for analyzing effects of the tax system and spending programs on the determination of government spending and taxpayer welfare and show that tax system or spending program which is suboptimal from a Ramsey point of view can improve taxpayer welfare because the system creates...

This paper demonstrates that there is a robust empirical association between the extent to which an economy is exposed to trade and the size of its government sector. This association holds for a large cross-section of countries, in low- as well as high-income samples, and is robust to the...

One possible explanation for the difficulty in controlling the budget is that a major component of spending --tax expenditures--receives privileged status. It is treated as tax cuts rather than spending. This paper explores the implications of that classification and illustrates how it can lead...

This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In doing so, we show that...

Comparing this repeat Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment with the original 2007 assessment reveals overall improvement across most Performance Indicators, with slippage in some areas and no change in rating for others. This 2012 PEFA report also takes place at a...

Agriculture occupies a key position in the Kazakhstan economy. Although accounting for only 5 percent of GDP, agriculture continues to employ almost one third of the population. Studies of agriculture in Kazakhstan confirm significant un-tapped productive and export potential for the sector....

Improving access to quality education has been the backbone of several development strategies around the world and considerable public resources have been dedicated to achieving this goal. However, one could wonder whether increasing public education expenditure would drive better access to...

Based on a sample of 56 countries, we find that while fiscal policy in the G-7 countries appears to be broadly consistent with Barro's tax smoothing proposition, in developing countries government spending and taxes are highly procyclical (i.e., government spending rises and taxes fall during...