Substantial fiscal consolidation was achieved under the aegis of the 2003 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act. While deficits widened anew in 2008 and 2009, against the backdrop of the global financial and economic crisis, efforts to reduce them have resumed since. To ensure...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

Victory in the War for Independence brought a vast amount of land within the grasp of the new American nation -- territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River between the southern shores of the Great Lakes and Spanish Florida. These lands were initially claimed by...

The paper draws macroeconomic policy lessons by contrasting the developing countries experience in the 2000s —including their performance in the recent global crisis— with the previous three decades of financial globalization. The main lesson is the crucial role of macroeconomic policies in...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. The paper first summarizes a number of issues facing the PRC, including the possibility of slower growth and...

This paper develops a context-specific model (Greif, 1997) to analyze the case of failed market-oriented reform in Colombia during 1974-78. The methodology keeps the contextual specificity at a manageable level, which is no more than the institutional structure under consideration, while it...

In this article, I examine the relationship between monetary and fiscal policies in a panel of 70 developing countries. I find that the size of the government's defict and the methods by which it is financed are strongly related to monetary policy reactions to increases in both government credit...

Síntesis El gobierno de Humala se instaló en el año 2011 con el objetivo de combatir la exclusión social. ¿Hasta qué punto ello se ha logrado? Según las cifras oficiales del INEI, 450,842 personas han dejado de ser pobres entre el 2011 y 2012, pero en términos monetarios. Esto quiere...

The economic crisis arising in 2008 has severely limited the options of economic policy in Hungary. The absence of fiscal expansion, and deficiencies in the coordination of fiscal and monetary policy have had a negative impact on the effectiveness of measures in economic policy to boost economic...

I present a tractable dynamic model of political economy where disagreements about the composition of public spending result in implementation of short-sighted policies. The relative price of investment to consumption is excessively large in equilibrium due to over-taxation. Investment rates are...