Most WAEMU countries are likely to see economic growth deteriorate over the next two years as a result of the global economic crisis, and some WAEMU countries will be more severely affected by the crisis than others. This could have a detrimental effect on efforts to reduce poverty....

This paper documents cyclical patterns of government expenditures in sub-Saharan Africa since 1970 and explains variation between countries and over time. Controlling for endogeneity, it finds government expenditures to be slightly more procyclical in sub-Saharan Africa than in other developing...

Natural resource revenues are an increasingly important financing source for public investment in many developing economies. Investing volatile resource revenues, however, may subject an economy to macroeconomic instability. This paper applies to Angola the fiscal framework developed in Berg et...

The global financial crisis poses significant challenges to fiscal policies in Sub-Saharan African countries. Growth will weaken considerably as export prices and volumes, remittances, tourism, and capital flows decline. The fiscal effects of the crisis are likely to be large and to operate...

This paper uses household survey data to estimate the incidence of tax and spending programs in Honduras. Any such exercise is fraught with difficulty, so our simplifying assumptions are carefully explained. Rather than look at tax and spending completely independently, we evaluate net incidence...

This paper presents, for the first time, multi-dimensional indices of the quality of budget institutions in low-income countries. The indices allow for benchmarking against the performance of middle-income countries, across regions, and according to different institutional arrangements that...

This paper uses household survey data to estimate the incidence of tax and spending programs in Honduras. Any such exercise is fraught with difficulty, so our simplifying assumptions are carefully explained. Rather than look at tax and spending completely independently, we evaluate net incidence...