Since it was first recognized in August 1982, the international debt crisis has dominated economic policy making in the developing countries. The prolonged debt crisis of those highly indebted countries whose debts are owed primarily to the commercial banks has resisted all the creative...

India's growth performance has been impressive over the last two decades. But its sustainability has been in question, first with the 1991 fiscal-balance of payments crisis (BoP), and then again after 1997/98, when fiscal deficits returned to the 10 percent of GDP range and government debt grew....

In recent years, various Latin American governments have resorted to taxes on bank debits and financial transactions as alternative ways of raising revenue. Considerable interest has developed in understanding the consequences of such reforms. The author constructs a dynamic general equilibrium...

The link between economic growth, and better provision of infrastructure services may be unproven, but it is clear that reforms to make infrastructure services more competitive (where possible), and to provide strong, and independent economic regulation of natural monopolies, do create an...

For the evaluation of macroeconomic policies Colombian authorities rely heavily, if not exclusively, on the operational framework known as the Financial Programming Model developed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1950s. Based on this static framework, the formulation of fiscal policy...

Mexico has experimented with several tax instruments designed to promote private capital formation. Among such initiatives were general and industry-specific tax credits, employment tax credits, and corporate tax credits. The authors examine relative efficacy of such instruments using a dynamic...

The purpose of this paper is to derive a framework for quantifying the contribution of the most important economic and policy variables to the public sector deficit. The method involves behavioral relations, identities for some key macroeconomic and sector variables and an accounting breakdown...

The Russian Federation has one of the richest natural resource endowments in the world. Despite their importance in the Russian economy, natural resources do not contribute as much as they could to public revenues. Large resource rents (excess payments, or above-normal profits generated by...

Despite a dramatic shift away from subsidies in the early years of transition, the countries of Central Europe still show signs of unsuccessful fiscal adjustment, insufficient deficit reduction, and loose spending policy. High social transfers and low efficiency of government spending remain two...

Under cash-flow taxation, a country can tax the cash flow of domestic producers, domestic residents, or domestic citizens. The implications are different in each case. The paper examines the positive and normative effects of various versions of a cash-flow tax, focusing on the effects of such a...