Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a...

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-term growth. It briefly reviews the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change, but finds it unsatisfactory as a model of long-term growth. The...

This paper concludes that Colombia's impressive fiscal adjustment during 1985 - 1987 was due to structural changes in fiscal policy, not simply to such fortuitous events as the coffee boom. Although impressive, the fiscal adjustment fell short of actually improving the government's net financial...

To study the adjustment to the debt crisis, this paper compares the experience of seven"crisis"debtor countries with those of five"noncrisis"debtor countries. In response to a sharp reduction in external capital flows, the crisis countries rescheduled their debt during 1982-87. The noncrisis...

This paper explores the broad themes of the literature on economic growth. It makesthe following two broad conclusions. First, it notes that the efficiency of investment is as important as the level of investment in determining growth performance. Secondly, it states that keeping to a minimum...

This paper offers an empirical evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure. Drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000, and using a panel time-series approach, the paper estimates a long-run aggregate production...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

For reason of empirical tractability, analysis of cointegrated economic time series is often developed in a partial setting, in which a subset of variables is explicitly modeled conditional on the rest. This approach yields valid inference only if the conditioning variables are weakly exogenous...

This paper examines the extent of international consumption risk sharing for a group of 50 industrial and developing countries. The analysis is based on the empirical implementation of a model of partial consumption insurance whose parameters have the natural interpretation of coefficients of...

This paper shows that the welfare of a country's representative consumer can be measured using just two variables: current and future total factor productivity and the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences...