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 authors bring new empirical evidence on the impact of the choice of ownership and regulatory regime on firms'productivity and prices paid by consumers. They collect the evidence from a sample of electricity distribution companies in Latin America. The authors rely on estimations of labor and...

Anderson and Martin provide simple, robust rules for evaluating public spending in distorted economies. Their analysis integrates, within a clean unified framework, previous treatments of project evaluation as special cases. In this paper, the authors use a general system of fiscal accounting...

The idea of an optimal export tax on a commodity is based on the assumption that by imposing a tax, a country can improve its welfare whenit faces a downward-sloping demand curve for the commodity. The idea is thought to be particularly relevant to producers with large world market shares for...

Many manufacturers in developing countries produce their own electricity because the public supply is unavailable or unreliable. The authors develop a model of the firm in which electricity is produced internally, with scale economies. The model explains the observed behavior (prevalent in...

After discussing ownership issues related to tropical forests, theauthor develops a simple general equilibrium model to represent - at least in a stylized way - the salient aspects of the deforestation process. He uses the model to generate first- and second-best policy options for controlling...

After decades of heavy trade restrictions, fiscal distortions, and currency overvaluation, Cameroon implemented important commercial and fiscal policy reforms. Almost simultaneously, a major CFA devaluation cut the international price of Cameroon's currency in half. The authors examine the...

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...

Nigeria's oil boom has not brought an end to perennial stagnation in the non-oil economy. Is this the unavoidable consequence of the resource boom or have misguided policies contributed? This paper indicates that the extreme volatility of expenditure rather than Dutch Disease effects are behind...

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....