The Government of Moldova's Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (EGPRSP) lays out an ambitious plan for sustaining growth and poverty reduction and reshaping the government to meet the needs of a market economy. The public expenditures envisaged under this ambitious plan,...

Guinea-Bissau's large public sector wage bill poses a major threat to the country's macroeconomic stability: it hampers growth, limits the government's ability to service the domestic and external debt, and crowds out private investments. For this reason, the government decided in early 2006 to...

This report on managing government finances for growth and poverty reduction in Lesotho is centered on three areas of analysis: (i) macroeconomic and fiscal performance and prospects; (ii) inter and intra-sectoral allocation of resources; and (iii) public expenditure and financial management. A...

This Public Expenditure Review (PER) builds on the commitments of the 2003 Country Economic Memorandum (CEM), and 2002 Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) Progress Report, being its primary objective to assess strengths and weaknesses in key areas of public expenditure, and identify policy options...

Lebanon's current priority -- in the face of high public deficits and unsustainable debt dynamics -- is to contain and rationalize public expenditures in every possible sector while improving the efficiency of social spending. The needed containment of primary public expenditures should be...

The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1) the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and...

Public spending has effects which are complex to trace and difficult to quantify. But the composition of public expenditure has become the key instrument by which development agencies seek to promote economic development. In recent years, the development assistance to heavily indebted poor...

This note analyzes the trends and evolution of public spending in the agriculture sector in Indonesia, as well as its impact on the growth of agriculture during the period 1976-2006. Public spending on agriculture and irrigation had a positive impact on agriculture growth during that period,...

While there are strong theoretical arguments for ways in which public spending influences growth, robust empirical links have been difficult to establish. More recently, many of the methodological problems that plagued the earlier literature have been overcome and interesting policy lessons...

The Poverty Action Fund (PAF) was introduced in Uganda in 1998 to reorient government expenditures towards implementing its Poverty Education Action Plan (PEAP) as well as to account for Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) resource use. This paper notes the successes of the PAR, the negative...