The sharp increase in debt in the Caribbean since the mid-1990s has focused attention on the conduct of fiscal policy in the region. This paper aims to diagnose how fiscal policy has behaved during this period by looking at three main cycles of the economy: the business, election, and natural...

The impact of fiscal stimulus depends not only on short-term tax and spending policies, but also on expectations about offsetting measures in the future. This paper analyzes the effects of an increase in government spending under a plausible debt-stabilizing policy that links current stimulus to...

This paper studies the effects of fiscal policy response in 118 episodes of systemic banking crisis in advanced and emerging market countries during 1980-2008. It finds that timely countercyclical fiscal measures contribute to shortening the length of crisis episodes by stimulating aggregate...

How effective was public investment in stimulating the Japanese economy during the economic stagnation of the 1990s? Using a dataset of regional public investment spending, we find that investment multipliers were higher than for public consumption, although they were relatively low and...

Over the next four decades, increasing old-age dependency ratios exert an enormous upward pressure on welfare spending in most developed countries. As this is mainly due to existing unfunded public pension schemes, many countries have embarked on far-reaching reforms in this area, strengthening...

This paper analyzes endogenous fiscal policy and public decision in an endogenous growth model where agents care about social status and environmental quality. The quest for a higher status is assimilated to a preference for capital wealth. The government uses income tax to finance...

An extended community preference model including real and financial investments is estimated on accounting time-series data for the local public sector in Norway. The estimation results indicate considerable sluggishness in local public spending, both in current expenditure and investment...

This paper examines, concisely and in a descriptive way, conceptual aspects related to the social public expenditure, social policy, and the models applied in Venezuela. In this context, possible relationships existing among the social and total expenditure and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)...

It is widely recognised that public-sector purchasers tend to discriminate in favour of domestic suppliers. We study the consequences of home-biased public procurement on international specialisation. In the theoretical analysis we find two effects. First, a country will specialise in the sector...

In the public sector in developing countries, leakage of public resources could prove detrimental to users and affect the well-being of the population. In this paper, we empirically examine the importance of leakage of government resources in the health sector in Chad and its effects on...