A recent but rapidly growing empirical literature focuses on the relationship between public and private capital. But for the most part, it ignores the heterogeneity of public investment. In many countries, especially in the developing world, public investment includes not only basic...

What was the impact of Brazil's 1998-99 currency crisis-which resulted in a change of exchange rate regime and a large real devaluation-on the occupational structure of the labor force and the distribution of incomes? Would it have been possible to predict such effects ahead of the crisis? The...

The authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid, public investment, growth, and poverty. Public investment is disaggregated into education, infrastructure, and health, and affects both aggregate supply and demand. Dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for...

India's growth performance has been impressive over the last two decades. But its sustainability has been in question, first with the 1991 fiscal-balance of payments crisis (BoP), and then again after 1997/98, when fiscal deficits returned to the 10 percent of GDP range and government debt grew....

Despite significant progress in economic reformthroughout the 1990s, and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, the...

For the evaluation of macroeconomic policies Colombian authorities rely heavily, if not exclusively, on the operational framework known as the Financial Programming Model developed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1950s. Based on this static framework, the formulation of fiscal policy...

Since Egypt's government introduced an economic reform and structural adjustment program in 1991, Egypt's Central Bank has been engaged in massive sterilized interventions to support the fixed nominal exchange rate regime. The result of this process, however, has been an increasing fiscal...

The purpose of this paper is to derive a framework for quantifying the contribution of the most important economic and policy variables to the public sector deficit. The method involves behavioral relations, identities for some key macroeconomic and sector variables and an accounting breakdown...

The authors compare the implementation of two apparently similar stabilization programs by two reforming socialist countries, launched two weeks apart (Dec. 1989 in Yugoslavia and Jan. 1990 in Poland). They investigate possible differences underlying the apparently similar programs that may...

A key question for stabilization programs concerns how governments get into fiscal difficulty in the first place. Accordingly, this paper is about fiscal policy issues that arise during such macroeconomic stabilization in developing economies. Specifically, this report sets out the basics, as...