Policy toward fiscal rules is an important issue in the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia). According to a rough estimate, the countries with rules (all but North Macedonia) have complied with their debt and...

US federal transfers to individuals are large, countercyclical, vary geographically, and are often credited for helping stabilize regional economies. This paper estimates the short-run effects of these transfers using plausibly exogenous regional variation in temporary stimulus packages and...

This paper analyzes the procyclicality of fiscal policy on the tax and spending sides in a sample of 116 developing countries between 2000 and 2016. About 20 percent of the countries in the sample switched from procyclical to countercyclical policy stance. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 30 of 39...

Colombia has reduced extreme poverty in the past 16 years by almost half, moderate poverty by 22 percentage points, and made more than four million Colombians jump the threshold of multidimensional poverty. However, it remains one of the most unequal countries in the region, after Brazil and...

Fiscal policy is central to not only macroeconomic stability and growth, but also to poverty and inequality reduction. This paper provides the most comprehensive assessment of the distributional incidence of Turkey's fiscal policy to date. It analyzes the combined and individual incidence of...

The expansionary fiscal contraction (EFC) hypothesis states that fiscal austerity can increase output or consumption when a country is under heavy debt burdens because it sends positive signal about the country's solvency situation and long-term economic wellbeing. Empirical tests of this...

This study assesses the redistributive effects of fiscal policy in Mali and Niger. Fiscal policy is poverty increasing in Mali (by 2.4 percentage points) and Niger (2.5 percentage points). This is a result of primarily two factors: indirect taxes (value-added taxes and import duties) and direct...

This paper analyzes whether fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies or smooths business cycle fluctuations. The paper estimates several econometric models to explore the cyclicality of government spending and tax buoyancy. The findings show that fiscal policy is procyclical in most countries. In...