As with any reform, making the property tax work requires visionary leadership, an appropriate policy framework, strong administrative capacity, and appropriate incentives to mobilize the political, administrative and popular support needed to enhance property tax revenues, equity and...

Peru represents a laboratory for examining the different approaches to the centralized or decentralized delivery of public services over the past quarter of a century. There is a renewed and increasing interest in decentralization in Peru as a mechanism to generate more involved decision making...

Computational general equilibrium models (CGE) and micro-simulation models (MSM) each have their own sets of strengths and weaknesses. Both have been widely used for the analysis of fiscal policies in developing countries, and many attempts have been made to link the two models, thereby...

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on the extent and possible channels of tax competition among provincial governments in China. Using a panel of provincial- level data for 1993-2007, we nd strong evidence of strategic tax interaction among provincial governments. Tax policy is...

The paper studies the revenue, eciency, and distributional implications of a simple strategy of ofsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes so as to leave consumer prices unchanged. We employ a dynamic micro-founded macroeconomic model of a small open...

The paper revisits the policy debate on institutional reform approaches to property rights protection and empirically examines it in the context of FDI flows to the MENA region. Using panel data on 11 MENA countries for the period 1991-2007 and adopting FGLS methodology,the paper finds a...

The paper assesses the performances of the urban local bodies in the state of Karnataka in India.We use non parametric Data Envelopment Analysis as a tool to measure technical efficiencies of the ULBs. If we compare the services in a particular size class of city with the norms we find that in...

Using various methods estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 110 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1999-2000 in developing countries is 41%, in transition countries 38% and in OECD...

As a public sector project carried out by the tax administering agency, pursuit of the hard-to-tax is subject to a cost-benefit analysis. However, considerable intrinsic uncertainty of this project and endogenous dynamic relationship between costs and benefits make the standard model of...

India will face great problems in finding a way to finance public services in its large cities in the next two decades. Backlogs in service levels and infrastructure are already great, and migration to urban areas will put even more pressure on state and local government budgets. Metropolitan...