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...

Despite significant progress in economic reformthroughout the 1990s, and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, the...

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...

The monopoly-supported universal service obligation (USO) is usually defended on the grounds that the monopoly allows for cross-subsidy in letter services that in turn allows universal access to a service of great importance to all. The author argues that letter delivery (as opposed to other...

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...

This paper develops an econometric technique that deals with shortcomings of existing methods for estimating the tax elasticity and the impact on revenues of discretionary tax measures. This model highlights the roles that discretionary tax measures and economic growth play in effecting the...