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...

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 slowdown and possible reversal in the rural-to-urban flow of labor in Ghana is symptomatic of a basic shortcoming in the country's economic recovery: the inadequate growth of the productive sector in the non-agricultural economy. The rate of growth of GDP has been adequate but much of the...

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of...

This paper reviews the experience with public finance issues under adjustment programs. This experience shows that fiscal changes are often triggered by budget and balance of payment crises. As a result, short-term considerations have dominated the policy measures introduced. Traditional...

For almost twenty years, Pakistan's fiscal deficit, at about 7 percent of GNP, averaged nearly twice the level for Asian countries as a whole. This paper examines the causes of Pakistan's fiscal deficits. The authors examine why, despite these deficits, the country's macroeconomic performance...

This paper reviews the literature and country experience on the macroeconomics of fiscal policy in low income Africa. Given the experience of the 70's and 80's, the ultimate focus of the discussion must be the interaction of fiscal policy with the challenges of stabilization and structural...

The aim of this paper is to examine the implications for certain key macroeconomic variables in relation to reductions in public spending. In particular, the paper looks at; the rate of inflation, the interest rate, and the rate of growth of real GNP. The paper develops an intertemporal general...