Limited fiscal space limits Djibouti's ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals and improve the living conditions of its population. Djibouti's fiscal structure is unique in that almost 70 percent of government revenue is denominated in foreign currency (import taxes, foreign aid grants,...

In Tunisia's emerging, more competitive environment, the key precondition for accelerated growth and faster job creation is greater private investment, compared to other high-growth countries, Tunisia's growth was driven more by public and less by private investment.Comparisons with fast-growing...

Improving public sector performance and governance is a key pillar in the World Bank's engagement strategy for the MNA region. Public governance is one of the mechanisms through which the values of development are secured for the people. These values include equality of treatment, freedom to...

Argentinean export growth was impressive during the recent economic boom (2003-2007). However, decomposing export growth reveals that the extensive margin (increases in exports of existing products to existing markets) dominates, while the intensive margin (increases in exports of new products...

Argentina's government has resorted to fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool to mitigate the negative impact of the current economic downturn on aggregate demand. Empirical results based on a vector error correction model suggest, however, that the fiscal multiplier is relatively small and...

Despite recent efforts toward collecting evidence of vertical specialization for developed economies, scarce work has been dedicated to developing economies and to Argentina, in particular. The key contribution of this paper is to provide comparable estimates of vertical specialization as...

This paper presents new evidence on the causal links between changes in the business environment and firm productivity growth. It contributes to the literature in three important aspects. First, it constructs a unique database merging information from two large firm-level databases. The samples...

Limited fiscal space limits Djibouti's ability to meet the Millennium Development Goals and improve the living conditions of its population. Djibouti's fiscal structure is unique in that almost 70 percent of government revenue is denominated in foreign currency (import taxes, foreign aid grants,...

Do public sector workers earn a wage premium in Djibouti and are the returns to education different across the sectors? The authors estimate private and public sector wage earnings using 1996 household survey data, while controlling for selectivity using Heckman's two stage approach. They find...