The paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of fiscal decentralization within Russian regions in 1994-2001. The conventional view that more decentralized governments are found in regions and countries with higher income, higher ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and higher...

The authors study the political economy of bank privatization in Argentina. The results of their study strongly support the hypothesis that political incentives affect the likelihood of privatization. They find that: a) provinces whose governors belonged to the fiscally conservative Partido...

The author explores 20 criteria for a good road pricing system and presents case studies illustrating the costs, revenues, and benefits of alternative congestion charging mechanisms. The author finds that manual tollbooths are not suitable for congestion charging because they are land-, labor-,...

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...

As socialist countries move toward market systems, fiscal policy is an important part of their reform agenda. First, they need to reorient public spending to focus more on the provision of"public"goods. Second, they need to adopt more selective, predictable, and nondiscretionary means to finance...

Economists have stressed that the efficiency costs of taxation are not the obvious costs to taxpayers of handing over payments to the government. Instead, the efficiency costs stem from the efforts of taxpayers to avoid paying money to the government, whether it is consuming less of the taxed...

Driven by fiscal austerity and disenchantment with the performance of state-provided infrastructure services, many governments have turned to the private sector to build, operate, finance, or own infrastructure in power, gas, water, transport, and telecommunications sectors. Private capital...

Brazil's domestic debt has posed two challenges to policymakers: it has grown very fast and, despite progress, remains extremely short in maturity. The authors analyze Brazil's experience with domestic public debt management, searching for policy prescriptions for the next few years. After...

Russian firms commonly provide many nonmonetary benefits to workers, including such benefits as housing and some aspects of education and health care. Nonmonetary benefits may amount to 35 percent of labor costs, which is high compared with OECD countries. In a market economy, most of these...

Privatization has been a popular strategy for improving efficiency in both market and transition economies. The literature on privatization includes broad discussions of pricing techniques but overlooks tax issues. In reality, a state-owned company loses its privilege of paying no taxes once it...