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...

In practice, conventional measures of the fiscal deficit exclude the activities of public financial institutions. As a result, fiscal policies may be applied inappropriately when these institutions - especially the central bank - run large losses (the quasi-fiscal deficit). The macroeconomic...

The debate on fiscal policy in Europe centers on how to let automatic stabilizers work while achieving fiscal consolidation. There is significant agreement on the importance of using fiscal policy as a counter-cyclical instrument, as monetary policy can no longer play this role. In contrast,...

Most economists treat fiscal policy as exogenous and consider policymakers as machines to be programmed. Rarely do they seek to determine why, for instance, some countries rely on the inflation tax while others use direct taxation, let alone what political factors affect such decisions. Yet...

Did the World Bank's policy-based lending to Kenya in the 1980s allow Kenya to undertake adjustment, or to postpone it? The answer is mixed, says the author. Success was greatest in trade liberalization (and exchange rate depreciation), and to a lesser extent in export development -- and these...

Fiscal policy is central to a country's economic and social objectives, from macroeconomic stability to sustainable growth and poverty reduction. But evaluations of a country's fiscal performance, over time or relative to other countries, are often conducted independent of other development...

Adjustment to the macroeconomic crises of the eighties was least successful on the fiscal front. The authors, in this introduction to a symposium on fiscal issues in adjustment, summarize the issues raised by papers in the symposium. Those papers deal with various aspects of the fiscal crisis...

The theoretical basis for the"heterodox shocks"recently implemented in Argentina and Brazil is that chronic inflation is essentially inertial - the product of staggered prices and wage adjustments. The underlying assumption is that the economic process is a cooperative game. Without legal and...

The author examines the effect of fiscal adjustment on the real exchange rate. The argument is made that the direction and extent of that effect depends on the way fiscal adjustment is carried out. If a fiscal deficit is reduced mainly by reducing total government spending, the effect on the...