Colombia has engaged in a sustained process of fiscal decentralisation over the past decades. This paper analyses three aspects of fiscal performance for Colombia’s departments. First, it studies the sustainability aspects of subnational finances by estimating a fiscal reaction function....

Natural disasters have caused, and continue to cause, a significant amount of economic costs. The costs of disasters are often, and to a large extent, shouldered by governments, especially in economies where private insurance markets are not well developed. Governments are asked to provide...

This paper investigates if higher public spending in education and better teacher qualifications are related to student’s performance, using data from Saber 11, a national standardized test conducted by Instituto Colombiano para la Evaluación de la Educación. The estimation exploits...

Improving public sector efficiency can help to meet two conflicting objectives: ensuring fiscal consolidation and maintaining room for growth-friendly spending. However, the public sector lags on the application of e-government and e-procurement, insufficiently prioritizes spending, and suffers...

This working paper explores avenues to improve public sector efficiency in Latvia, a catching-up and ageing economy where spending needs are large. Ensuring that spending allocated to core services (e.g. education, healthcare) is adequate to achieve convergence of policy outcomes to OECD upper...

OECD indicators of structural policy show that policy changes in Italy since 1998 should have improved the environment for entrepreneurship significantly, but in the same period its economic performance has deteriorated noticeably. This may be partly because there is a difference between policy...