This note provides guidance on how to select fiscal rules in a wide range of economies, including advanced, emerging market, and developing economies. The principles and methods discussed are intuitive and easy to implement, and leave room for policy judgment. The methods are based on past...

The market value of U.S. corporations, relative to the replacement cost of their tangible assets, declined by about 50% in 1973-74, and stagnated at that level for the following decade. This collapse in market valuations exactly coincides with the Oil Crisis of October 1973. Over the 1973-78...

Public debt-to-GDP ratios have undergone substantial fluctuations over both the short and long term. Most recently, global debt-to-GDP ratios peaked at 100% on average in 2020 due to COVID-19, retracting substantially by 2022. To understand what drives these movements, we propose a structural...

This paper quantifies the costs of a permanent increase in debt to GDP. We employ a deterministic, overlapping generations model with two assets and no risk of default. The two assets are public debt and private (productive) capital. We assume that the return on private capital equals the...

This paper explores the feasibility of an idea proposed first by the German Council of Economic Experts in 2011 and revisited by Italian and French authorities in 2021: the one-off mutualization of some European legacy debt through the creation of a European Debt Management Agency (EDMA). The...

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that have constrained South Africa''s growth since the end of apartheid by comparing its GDP components and its saving and investment performance with those of 10 faster-growing countries. The study finds that sluggish investment has undermined...

The purpose of this paper is to assess Madagascar''s competitiveness in recent years, using both price and nonprice indicators and an exchange rate assessment of the currency. We estimate the distance between the equilibrium and the actual real exchange rates using three methods: the...

This paper analyzes the impact of decentralization on overall fiscal performance in the European Union, taking into account fiscal institutional arrangements. We find that spending decentralization has been associated with sizably better fiscal performance, especially when transfer dependency of...