Transition literature has emphasized stabilization and enterprise restructuring. Both cross-country analyses and country-specific studies have tended to focus on fiscal stabilization and its indicators, highlighting the importance of quantitative fiscal adjustment to stabilization outcomes. Less...

The authors assess the macroeconomic and distributional effects of the privatization that Argentina began in 1989 in gas, electricity, telecommunications, and water and sanitation. Using a computable general equilibrium model, they track the effects of the changes observed between 1993, the...

The provision of public goods and the amelioration of market failure are the classical justifications for government intervention in the economy. In reality, (1) governments intervene in markets that are not affected by failure, and (2) a large share of the government resources is spent in...

Transferring ownership and control of enterprises from the public to the private sector has recently attracted great interest around the world. Several developed and developing countries have already divested varying portions of their public enterprise (PE) sectors, and many others are planning...

The authors find that incorporating tax-favored consumption in models of environmental tax swaps may overturn key results from earlier studies. In particular, a revenue-neutral pollution tax (or auctioned permits) can produce a substantial"double dividend"by reducing both pollution and the costs...

The author analyzes subsidies in Chile's public utilities. Over the last decade, especially, significant efforts have been made to extend public services to rural populations. An explicit consumption subsidy for potable water (targeted to the poorest twenty percent of the population) currently...

The author presents the view that informal economies arise when governments impose excessive taxes and regulations that they are unable to enforce. The author studies the determinants and effects of the informal sector using an endogenous growth model whose production technology depends...

This paper describes a general equilibrium based social policy model for Cote d'Ivoire whose aim is both to facilitate analysis of a wide range of social policy options, any of which could conceivablybe pursued in Cote d'Ivoire over the next five or ten years, and to provide a basis for further...

Given the dual role played by the Government as resource owner and tax collector in many sub - Saharan economies, it is important to separate"resource factor payments"from taxes through the use of different instruments. The instruments to be considered are: (1) a factor payment system that...

The authors examine how governments finance and allocate public spending, with an eye to developing strategies for pricing publicly provided health services. They also examine the implications of current policy and the possibility for rationalizing competing government priorities. Because...