In recent years, various Latin American governments have resorted to taxes on bank debits and financial transactions as alternative ways of raising revenue. Considerable interest has developed in understanding the consequences of such reforms. The author constructs a dynamic general equilibrium...

The authors explore the interaction between taxes on work-related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market. A congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in...

The authors investigate the optimal boundary between the public and private production sectors. They use a model in which government and private production coexist -in which a range of production activities can be carried out by either the government or the private sector. In effect, the...

The author summarizes the major findings and recommendations in Averting the Old Age Crisis, describing problems in traditional pension systems and proposals for reform. Then she describes how those reforms are being implemented in many countries and examines empirical evidence about pension...

The authors find that incorporating tax-favored consumption in models of environmental tax swaps may overturn key results from earlier studies. In particular, a revenue-neutral pollution tax (or auctioned permits) can produce a substantial"double dividend"by reducing both pollution and the costs...

The author analyzes (both theoretically and empirically) the international distortions and fiscal interdependence that arise because of different tax rates among a region's countries. The author also studies what happens when the countries try to harmonize taxes, focusing on how the...

The authors compare the performance of public and private sector manufacturing firms in Indonesia for 1981-95. They analyze whether public sector inefficiency is due primarily to agency-type problems ("ownership") or to the business environment in which public enterprises operate, as measured by...

After Poland's remarkable stabilization and liberalization in 1990, the economy faced three related problems: high wage and pension claims, a rising number of pensioners and unemployed workers, and a budget crisis, especially in 1991 and 1992. The author studies the role that wage and pension...

The authors review the qualitative macroeconomic and welfare implications of replacing a pay-as-you-go pension system with a fully funded scheme. They summarize the typically small effects found in the simulations literature, based on exogenous-growth one-sector models. Much larger, and...

The authors assess the macroeconomic and distributional effects of the privatization that Argentina began in 1989 in gas, electricity, telecommunications, and water and sanitation. Using a computable general equilibrium model, they track the effects of the changes observed between 1993, the...