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...

Bhutan's hydropower generation potential raises the prospect of tremendous development opportunities for the country: fast increasing export revenue, sustained economic growth, and rapid poverty reduction. Driven by developments in the hydropower sector, the country has grown at an average rate...

The objective of this paper is to provide practical recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the public financial management system as inputs to the envisaged Armenian public financial management (PFM) reform strategy. The paper aims at providing a comprehensive analysis of most of the...

The Pacific Financial Technical Assistance Center (PFTAC) produced 'A Public Financial Management Roadmap for Forum Island Countries' ("The Roadmap") in 2009 (PFTAC 2010). This document was adopted at the Forum Economic Ministers' Meeting (FEMM) of the Pacific Island Forum as an agreed approach...

This note analyzes the progress of three public sector reforms (Public Financial Management, Public Administration, and Decentralization and Deconcentration) in Cambodia and describes how their design, implementation, and institutional arrangements can be better sequenced and coordinated. It...

The Republic of Congo (Congo) boasts numerous assets that can be harnessed to build a strong and robust economy. These assets are oil, ore such as iron and potash, arable lands, and a young population. Congo is the fourth largest oil producer among West and Central African countries, both in...

This paper studies whether budget rigidities affect the probability of countries getting into fiscal distress and reduce the likelihood of governments performing fiscal adjustments. Budget rigidities are constraints that limit the ability of the government to change the size and structure of the...

This paper examines how fiscal rules, exchange rate regimes, and institutional quality affect the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy (how government spending responds to fluctuations in gross domestic product). The analysis is performed on a panel of 153 advanced, emerging, and developing...

Following the collapse of commodity prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2014-15, many countries in the region were unable to cushion the impact of the shock in order to experience a more gradual adjustment, to a large extent because they had not built adequate fiscal buffers...