Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates, within a clean unified framework, previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. In this paper, the authors use a general system of fiscal accounting...

The authors provide various estimates of the government net capital stocks for a panel of 26 developing countries over the period 1970-2001. Two kinds of internationally comparable series of public capital stocks are presented. The first estimates are based on the standard perpetual inventory...

In a highly distorted economy such as Angola's, budget accounts can be misleading - because prices in the parallel market, including the exchange rate, represent up to 100 times official prices. Parallel prices are the real opportunity costs for consumers and guide them in their decisions. The...

Nigeria's oil boom has not brought an end to perennial stagnation in the non-oil economy. Is this the unavoidable consequence of the resource boom or have misguided policies contributed? This paper indicates that the extreme volatility of expenditure rather than Dutch Disease effects are behind...

The black market foreign exchange premium is an important implicit tax on exports, creating a conflict between the fiscal goal of financing government spending with a limited menu of tax instruments and the allocative goal of stimulating exports. In this paper, the premium is solved for in a...

Malaysia's sustained growth in the 1970s was boosted by windfall gains during two oil price hikes plus a commodity boom. Oil and commodity prices fell in the 1980s and Malaysia, an oil exporter, bungled into a rather severe depression in 1985-86. But it recovered quickly, to the surprise of some...

The authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms'productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and...

The idea of an optimal export tax on a commodity is based on the assumption that by imposing a tax, a country can improve its welfare whenit faces a downward-sloping demand curve for the commodity. The idea is thought to be particularly relevant to producers with large world market shares for...

The paper analyzes governments'tradeoff between fiscal benefits and consumer surplus in privatization reforms of noncompetitive industries in developing countries. Under privatization, the control rights are transferred to private interests so that public subsidies decline. This benefit for...

Many manufacturers in developing countries produce their own electricity because the public supply is unavailable or unreliable. The authors develop a model of the firm in which electricity is produced internally, with scale economies. The model explains the observed behavior (prevalent in...