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...

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...

Given that public spending will have a positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring costs and benefits of public spending. The paper discusses one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy debates, namely,...

This paper presents a small-scale intertemporal model of endogenous growth that accounts for the composition of public expenditure and externalities associated with public capital. Government spending is disaggregated into various components, including maintenance, security, and investment in...

This paper brings together the literatures on the political economy of public expenditures and the determinants of economic growth. Based on a new dataset of rural public expenditures in a panel of Latin American economies, the econometric evidence suggests that non-social subsidies reduce...

The authors propose a"bottom up"approach to link public investment programs with a class of macro models recently developed to quantify Strategy Papers for Human Development (SPAHD) in low-income countries. The methodology involves establishing constant-price projections of investment outlays...

Fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator when growth-promoting spending is cut so much as to lower growth and thus the present value of future tax revenues to a degree that more than offsets the improvement in the cash deficit. Although short-term cash flows matter, a...

The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1)the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and...

This paper surveys fiscal policy in developing countries from the point of view of long-run growth. The first section reviews existing methodologies to estimate the effects of fiscal policy shocks and of systematic fiscal policy, with time series or with cross-sectional methods, and their...