In Belarus, divestiture of social assets, a misnomer for fringe benefits that comprise a part of wages, is needed to transform enterprises so they can function appropriately in a market economy. Maintaining supply of these services after enterprise divestiture is an important public policy...

The author examines the eroding tax base facing transitional economies by employing a framework that allows risk factors in assessing tax instruments. In an uncertain world, the author asks, which tax instruments should be used? The author examines Eastern Europe's revenue problem, including the...

In developing countries, most financial assets in formal markets are deposits at financial institutions. This potentially important tax base could be taxed at a low administrative cost. When revenues of financial taxes are significant, implicit taxes dwarf explicit taxes. The author focuses on...

How have tax systems, whose primary role is to raise resources to finance public expenditures, evolved in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? The authors find that: (1) the ratio of tax revenue-to-GDP decreased largely due to a fall in revenue from corporate...

The author aims to empirically determine the significant factors that affect the levels of budget deficits of central governments across time and across countries. He empirically tests two prominent theories of budget deficits-the Barro (1979) tax-smoothing approach, and the still-untested...

The authors analyze the links between Russia's disappointing growth performance in the second half of the 1990s, its costly and unsuccessful stabilization, the macroeconomic meltdown of 1998, and the spectacular rise of non-payments. Non-payments flourished in an environment of fundamental...

Subsidies funded by Russia's regional governments represented about 5.2 percent of GDP in 1995, almost triple the 2 percent of GDP in subsidies funded by the federal government. Regional policies vary greatly, influenced more by local factors than by the federal government. To find out what...

After studying the problems of administering road user taxes in 19 developing countries, the author reports the following, among other things. There is no single, correct structure for road user taxation since the various charges may play different roles in different national revenue systems....

The author analyzes the causes of the collapse of profitability in 1991 of the Polish enterprise sector. He explores how it affected the government budget and assesses the forecasts of enterprise sector performance used to prepare the government's 1990 and 1991 budgets. About half of the drop in...

The most effective regulators in developing countriesare following remarkably similar approaches. The main common element across"best practice"countries is the use of relatively simple quantitative models of operators'behavior and constraints to measure the impact of regulatory decisions on some...