The issue of whether the public sector enhances or retards long-run economic growth has been debated passionately in recent years. In this paper we use meta-analysis to shed light on the issue. A sample of 93 published studies, yielding 123 meta-observations, is used to examine the robustness of...

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the distributional impact, benefit incidence analysis, is...

Das Freihandelsabkommen zwischen der EU und den USA, TTIP, wird aufgrund seiner Größe auch Schwellen- und Entwicklungsländer betreffen. Diese profitieren zwar, wenn zusätzliches Wachstum in den TTIP-Ländern die Auslandsnachfrage nach ihren Waren erhöht, aber zugleich müssen sie um ihre...

TTIP wird, aufgrund der schieren Größe der transatlantischen Volkswirtschaft, Auswirkungen auf Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländer haben. Einerseits sollten höhere Einkommen in der EU und den USA die Nachfrage nach Gütern und Dienstleistungen der Drittstaaten steigern, was letzteren zu Guten...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic challenges created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, in terms of absorption and spending of aid - where the central bank controls absorption through monetary policy...

In accounting for the rather gloomy trend of the aid effectiveness literature over the last few years, one explanatory strand has been fiscal, suggesting in particular that aid flows in weak states have tended to erode the taxbase and the structure of institutions. We pursue this idea, tracing...

The so called resource curse, the fact that countries rich in natural resources often show lower rates of economic growth compared to resource-poor countries, is commonly attributed to the low quality of governance in resource-rich countries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative...

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a country's distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive...

The present paper explores the extent to which new joint General Budget Support (GBS) systems have been able to overcome the problems of aid dependency and negative fiscal incentives that can potentially result from high levels of on-budget aid. As approximately 90 percent of new joint GBS goes...

The objective of this paper is to examine the nature and magnitude of the effects of infrastructure provision on regional economic performance. The empirical evidence of our analysis is based on difference-in-difference estimation linking the changes in the growth rate of regional-level economic...