New Zealand's fiscal outlook deteriorated following the Global Financial Crisis, and in late 2008 fiscal projections showed net government debt in New Zealand increasing from 5% of GDP to around 40% within 10 years, mostly reflecting permanently lower expectations for future tax revenue. These...

This paper provides a self-contained overview of the present problems of state finances in India. It begins with an overview of historical evolution and current institutional structures, including economic, political, administrative and fiscal aspects of India's federal system. The paper then...

Latin America is a volatile, crisis-prone region, with limited and inadequate social insurance. Therefore, the long-term as well as the recent poor suffer significantly during crises. Furthermore, social spending is procyclical in the region, but less so than total spending, indicating that the...

After more than a decade of economic decline and civil war, Uganda was able to return to economic growth thanks to the policies pursued by Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which elicited considerable donor support. They include macroeconomic reforms, public sector restructuring,...

This paper presents a comprehensive cross-country database of fiscal space, broadly defined as the availability of budgetary resources for a government to service its financial obligations. The database covers up to 200 countries over the period 1990-2016, and includes 28 indicators of fiscal...

Economic growth is one of the objectives of the current government. Fiscal policy, encompassing government expenditure and taxation decisions, can significantly impact on economic growth. This paper proposes a framework which views fiscal policy through three lenses and applies this approach to...

New Zealand's fiscal policy framework has been in place for nearly 20 years. At its core is a set of principles around maintaining prudent levels of public debt and running fiscal surpluses on average over time. This framework, combined with an extended period of economic growth, contributed to...

Existing methodologies for estimating a government's structural budget balance are reviewed and applied to the case of New Zealand. Besides the conventional cyclical adjustment, an assessment is made of other possible non-structural elements to the budgetary position, including the terms of...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in New Zealand using a structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. The model is the five-variable structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework proposed by Blanchard and Perotti (2005), further augmented to allow for the...

How should taxes, government expenditures, the primary and fiscal surpluses and government liabilities be set over the business cycle? We assume that the government chooses expenditures and taxes to maximize the utility of a representative household, utility is increasing in government...