The United States government recently passed legislation and stabilization packages to respond to the COVID-19 (i.e., coronavirus disease 2019) outbreak by providing paid sick leave, tax credits, and free virus testing; expanding food assistance and unemployment benefits; and increasing Medicaid...

Mining resources have played an important role in the economy of Zambia. The country faces serious development challenges. This Working Paper investigates to which extent the mining of natural resources has facilitated public action regarding these challenges or whether, on the contrary, mining...

This paper investigates whether social cohesion makes economic reforms more likely. First, we investigated whether social cohesion is a coherent concept by using a principal-component factor (PCF) analysis covering 16 indicators used to measure social cohesion in the previous literature for 40...

How can Low-Income Countries (LICs) enhance tax revenue collection to finance their vast development needs? We address this question by analyzing seven tax reform experiences in LICs (Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Maldives, Mauritania, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda). Three lessons stand out, although...

The paper shows that a comparison of the appropriately-weighted sum of households' marginal willingness to pay for a public good with the net effect of the increased supply of the public good on shadow, as distinct from actual, government revenue is a generally valid rule for public good...