With over 95% of Iraq’s government budget received from oil revenues, an agreeable inter-governmental framework for managing petroleum resources and for distributing revenues is aptly regarded as the lynchpin of federalism. Iraq has great potential to develop a fiscal framework, consistent...

Summarizing twenty five years of Spanish local public finance is not an easy task. In 1978, the new democratic Constitution completely changed the face of public administration in Spain . Until then, and apart from some minor, unsuccessful attempts at decentralization during the Second Republic...

International capital markets are populated by heterogeneous investors. Some have better facilities to evaluate foreign borrowers and are more permanent players on the international scene. They are also more likely to invest longer-term. Others are more occasional, smaller-scale investors, and...

It has been more then four years since the economic crisis in Indonesia. While other Asian countries such as South Korea and Malaysia have shown significant improvement, Indonesia seems to have the slowest economic recovery process. In order to deal with the economic crisis, the government has...

South Africa is at a crossroads in its decentralization policy. On the one hand, it has declared its intention to strengthen the fiscal powers of local governments. On the other hand, the institutional arrangement necessary to guarantee fiscal decentralization, the power to raise local revenues,...

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...