This paper examines the effect of global transition to simpler, flatter income tax systems on the size of the shadow economy. By offering a new estimation framework, the paper revives the traditional electricity consumption approach to measuring the shadow economy. It overcomes the limitations...

Until the early 1990s, the discussions on fiscal policy primarily centered on the functions of economic stabilization, income redistribution and resource allocation. Long-term growth was not usually viewed as an end itself, and fiscal policy was often not sufficiently tailored to the different...

This paper compares for 13 Latin American countries the poverty and inequality impacts of cash transfer programs that are given to all children and the elderly (that is, categorical transfers), to programs of equal budget that are confined to the poor within each population group (that is,...

This paper studies the impact of product and labor market regulations on informality and unemployment in a general framework where formal and informal firms are subject to the same externalities, differing only with respect to some parameter values. Both formal and informal firms have monopoly...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from...

Remarkably little is known about the long-term impacts of project aid to lagging poor areas (Chen, Mu et al. 2006, 2008). This paper contributes to the debate about the role of rural transport infrastructure development in explaining the long-term rural development. In line with Grimm and Klasen...

This paper provides an overview on the impacts of food aid. We consider its effects on consumption, nutrition, food markets and labour supply, as well as the extent to which it exacerbates or mitigates conflict. We also consider the comparative evidence on alternatives to food aid including...

Innovative firms with good ideas may still struggle to fine-tune them to the stage where they can attract outside funding. We conduct a five-country randomized experiment that tests the impact of an investment readiness program. Firms then pitched their ideas to independent judges. The program...

This paper presents the new dynamic spatial general equilibrium (DSGE) model – RHOMOLO, which is built to support the EU policy design by undertaking holistic, micro-founded and disaggregated policy impact assessment. The RHOMOLO model is based on the theories of general equilibrium,...

Additionality is one of the key principles driving the functioning of the EU Cohesion Policies (ECP). The present paper studies how additionality affects the distributional effects of the ECP. Using the example of the firm-level investment support, we analyse the role of additionality and...