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...

We study the determinants of voting outcomes on the provision of public consumption through marginal income taxes in the context of the simple linear growth model. We provide analytical results on how the dynamic politicoeconomic equilibrium maps the economic fundamentals to policies and...

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...

Since almost two decades back a large number of LDCs have embarked on World Bank supported structural adjustment programs with the objective to promote econ-omic growth and private investment. I consider how the design of reform programs can increase reform credibility and thus reduce...

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...