The authors examine the role of governance-measured by level of corruption and quality of bureaucracy-and ask how it affects the relationship between public spending and outcomes. Their main innovation is to see if differences in efficacy of public spending can be explained by quality of...

How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional...

Using non-linear methods, this paper finds that existing estimates of government spending multipliers in expansion and recession may yield biased results by ignoring whether government spending is increasing or decreasing. For industrial countries, the problem originates in the fact that,...

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...

Using a new data set comprised of publicly available information, this paper provides cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social spending that covers the three sectors of health, education, and social protection has...

Despite the growing body of literature examining the effectiveness of transparency and accountability initiatives, there remains limited substantiation for whether and how open budgeting contributes to reductions in poverty and improvements in the lives of the poor. This paper reviews available...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks...

Using a new tax database for 28 countries and a variety of econometric methods, this paper contributes to the debate on the effects of fiscal policy on economic activity in a number of ways. The analysis finds that tax cuts have a stimulative effect on economic growth in developing countries....

This paper proposes a novel method of isolating fluctuations in public spending that are likely to be uncorrelated with contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks and can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. The approach relies on two features unique to many low-income countries: (1)...

Although many studies indicate that both the level and composition of public spending are significant for economic growth, the results in the empirical literature are still mixed. This paper studies the importance of country sample selection and expenditure classification in explaining these...