Fiscal policy in Latin America has been guided primarily by short-term liquidity targets whose observance was taken as the main exponent of fiscal prudence, with attention focused almost exclusively on the levels of public debt and the cash deficit. Very little attention was paid to the effects...

A joint production between the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, this report aims at helping policymakers and their advisers to better understand some of the most important and difficult issues related to the design, award, implementation, monitoring, and modification of...

The paper discusses recommendations made in a fiscal transparency evaluation report for Romania. Seven recommendations are made to improve the level of information available to decision makers and the public. The report recommends reducing fragmentation of existing fiscal reporting and expanding...

This paper discusses key findings of fiscal transparency evaluation for Finland. It highlights that Finland meets most of the principles of the Fiscal Transparency Code at good or advanced level. Some areas, notably related to the analysis and management of fiscal risks, are still rated as basic...

Fiscal reporting is intended to warn of fiscal crises while there is still time to prevent them. The recent crisis thus seems to reveal a failure of fiscal reporting: before the crisis, even reports on fiscal risk typically did not mention banks as a possible source of fiscal problems. One...

When growth-promoting spending is cut so much that the present value of future government revenues falls by more than the immediate improvement in the cash deficit, fiscal adjustment becomes like walking up the down escalator. Although short-term cash flows matter, too tight a focus on them...