Each year developing countries seek billions of dollars of investment in their infrastructure, and private investors, mostly in rich countries, seek places to invest trillions of dollars of new savings. Private foreign investment in the infrastructure of developing countries would seem to hold...

The problem of climate change seems to be a tragedy of the commons: despite the global benefits of reducing green-house gas emissions, no individual has any incentive to reduce his or her own emissions. Yet many people are making efforts to reduce emissions and putting pressure on businesses and...

Fiscal reporting is intended to warn of fiscal crises while there is still time to prevent them. The recent crisis thus seems to reveal a failure of fiscal reporting: before the crisis, even reports on fiscal risk typically did not mention banks as a possible source of fiscal problems. One...

Accounting devices that artificially reduce the measured fiscal deficit can be analyzed as transactions involving unrecognized assets and liabilities. Different accounting systems recognize different sets of assets and liabilities and are thus vulnerable to different sets of devices. Some...

Contingent liabilities create management problems for governments. They have a cost, but judging what the cost is and whether it is worth incurring is difficult. Except in the case of contingent liabilities created by simple guarantees of debt, governments usually can incur contingent...