The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had a profound impact on Mexico's economy and institutions. Clearly, no consideration of tax reform can ignore its role. The thinking about tax reform in Mexico requires evaluating NAFTA's effect on Mexico's economy, including its tax...

This paper is derived from a previous working paper prepared within a comprehensive review of India's trade regime and protection policies. One striking feature of India's protection structure has been the very high tariffs and protection on capital goods, thereby harming industrial...

This report examines the possibility of using a direct tax on consumption as a replacement for an existing income tax within the context of a developing country. The structural differences between income and consumption taxes are described, and some simple examples are used to illustrate the...

The author discusses the risks of infrastructure projects and the costs of capital, rationales for government support of private infrastructure ventures, and approaches to managing government guarantees of private infrastructure investments. Among his recommendations: 1) the decision to grant a...

The author examines the financing of U.S. direct investment abroad. Using a theoretical model, he first examines how home country investors can use debt finance to reduce their host country tax liability and to reduce the capital investment distortion attributable to foreign taxes. Empirically,...

The authors provide a detailed study of the Swiss pension system, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. The unfunded public pillar is highly redistributive. It has near universal coverage, a low dispersion of benefits (the maximum public pension is twice the minimum), and no ceiling on...

The aim of this paper is to understand the mechanism underlying access to credit. The author focuses on two important aspects of rural credit markets in Thailand. First, moneylenders and other informal lenders coexist with formal lending institutions such as government or commercial banks, and...

There is a close, if imperfect, relationship between the effectiveness of an economy's capital markets and its level (or rate of growth) of real development. This may be because financial markets provide liquidity, promote the sharing of information, or permit agents to specialize. There is...

The author provides a descriptive analysis of credit and monetary policies in Malaysia and investigates the distributional consequences of monetary policy there by focusing on small and medium-size industries and large manufacturing firms. The author suggests that"payoff"or"default"risk - as...

The objective of this paper is to apply a framework for macroeconomic consistency to Zimbabwe. Using annual data for 1981and 1987, the paper illustrates the usefulness of imposing consistency on the flow budget accounts (in both current and constant prices) of a developing economy. It presents...