This paper uses unique survey data from Bulgaria, a transition economy with a currency board, to examine the following questions: 1) what is the level of confidence in the currency board over various time horizons, 2) how cognizant is the population of the restrictions a currency board imposes...

This paper reviews the current knowledge on an issue of increasing policy interest: what impact fiscal decentralization has on economic growth. Fiscal decentralization may indeed have a direct impact on economic growth but the theoretical underpinnings for this relationship remain largely...

We expand the traditional tax incentive redundancy argument by investigating the implications of targeting incentives primarily to firms that would have invested anyway. Incorporating government revenue constraints, pliable tax officials, endogenous tax liabilities, and firms with heterogeneous...

Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have all carried-out comprehensive reforms of their inter-governmental fiscal systems in the decade since the inception of transition; and all three countries are in the process of considering or implementing far-reaching “second-generation” reforms in this...

The last decade has been witness to one of the largest tax experiments in economic history, the transformation from centrally-planned to market-based tax systems. The cultural and institutional legacy of central planning has had a lasting impact on tax reform in countries in transition. The...

Few policy analysts or politicians believe that there should be no natural resource revenue sharing. The question is, “how large a share?” The objective in this paper is to evaluate the system of sharing natural resource revenue in Indonesia against the criteria that are most often discussed...

The Government of Pakistan is considering an extensive tax and administrative reform by 2009 and asked the World Bank to provide a discussion paper on several technical issues. This report is dealing with the international aspects of the tax system: (a) the double tax agreements, and (b) the...

This paper studies the effects of financial development on the sources of growth in different groups of countries. Recent theoretical work shows that financial development may affect productivity and capital accumulation in different ways in industrial versus developing countries. This...

The Pakistan system of taxing enterprises has undergone some major changes in recent years. Nevertheless, the corporate tax system remains plagued by a number of problems. The existence of numerous exemption programs has significantly reduced tax revenues, and has greatly distorted the...

This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of all of Pakistan’s major sources of tax revenue: the individual income tax, the corporate income tax, the sales tax, excise taxes and trade taxes on imports. For each major tax it describes the nature of the current...