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From the Editor’s Desk (September 2012)Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
Tony Addison Mid-September finds UNU-WIDER very busy preparing for our big conference on climate change and development policy that takes place later...
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
Tony Addison It’s now February, and Helsinki remains deep in snow. We had an extended blizzard last weekend, with temperatures hovering around minus...
This special issue of the Journal of International Development presents the results of a study initiated two years ago by UNU/WIDER on `The impact of the liberalization of the exchange rate and financial markets in sub-Saharan Africa'. The project...
Members of the CFA-zone enjoy currency convertibility, fiscal and monetary policies which are more prudent than SSA as a whole, and a large amount of financial and technical assistance. These advantages do not appear, however, to have resulted in...
The Egyptian food system has been affected by both global food markets and domestic factors. During the recent global food price crisis, an estimated 30–40 percent of the price fluctuations in the global food market were transmitted to Egypt’s food...
Researchers have linked sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) poor growth performance in recent decades to several factors, including geography, institutions, and low returns to investment. This literature has not yet integrated the research that identifies...
The paper reviews the extent of the income inequality decline that took place in Latin America in 2002-10 and then focuses on the factors that may explain such decline. These include a lowered skill premium following an expansion of secondary...
Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget...
Growth, poverty reduction, and social peace are all undermined when public expenditure management and taxation are weak and when the fiscal deficit and public debt are not managed successfully. And large-scale aid and debt relief cannot work without...
A survey of the changing relationship between the market for political services and the market for financial services.
The Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) was launched in September 2014 and, in the few years since, has gone on to be recognized as the go-to source for researchers and policy makers seeking cross-country data on government revenues and taxes. However...
An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour, although theory and existing evidence is ambiguous regarding the nature of these effects. This...
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development—particularly in the developing world. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be...
This paper uses a recent household survey and the CEQ framework to revisit and extend previous research on the impact of fiscal policy on income redistribution, and poverty in South Africa. We find, in accordance with previous research, that direct...
Sub-Saharan Africa is the fastest urbanising region of the world. This demographic transformation has occurred in concert with two other trends in the region, nascent democratisation and stalled decentralisation. Using the case of Lusaka, Zambia...
This paper examines the patterns and trends in inter-state migration across Indian states and observes that migration is affected by demographic profile as well as the fiscal profile of states. Econometric estimation suggests that level of vertical...
This journal presents a synopsis of the contextual conditions, factors and challenges under which the recent evolution of tax systems has taken place, as an introduction to this United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
An interesting theory of transition must give a convincing account of structural adjustment and supply side improvement. In this paper, I discuss the incentives for government to undertake costly supply side improvement and how these relate to...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
We have now witnessed more than half a decade of relatively heavy capital inflows to a large group of highly heterogeneous developing countries and economies in transition in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Former Soviet Union, Latin America, and parts of...
This paper discusses the process, problems and impacts of the financial sector reform in Indonesia, particularly since the late 1980s. The reform has encouraged a surge in private sector capital inflows to supplement the already high domestic savings...
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments financed more than 5000 fiscal support policies worldwide in 2020–21. The pandemic response is an...
This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs. It...
Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa’s development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization...
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity...
South Africa runs a primary fiscal deficit and the long-term interest rate on government borrowing, r, is greater than the long-term economic growth rate, g. Without intervention, debt will continue to rise until there is a disorderly fiscal stop...
This paper calculates automatic stabilization in Ghana, South Africa, and Ecuador to explain income cushioning amid income and demand shocks. Fiscal policies within these countries are also stress tested to gauge welfare contingencies and insurance...
Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...
This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our...
We utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from...
This paper explores the macroeconomic implications of aid flows in countries with weak institutions. It argues that these countries should take into account their overall macroeconomic position, their capacity to absorb aid at the sectoral and...
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard...
In this interview Professor Nora Lustig, Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics at Tulane University, talks about the importance of...
This paper employs a cointegrated vector autoregressive model to assess the growth effect of aid in Uganda over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid in Uganda has had both direct and indirect beneficial association with growth; that it is the...
Part of Journal Special Issue Urban Governance and Service Delivery in sub-Saharan Africa
It is a widely accept projection that many low income countries (LICs) will remain low income for some time to come. Consequently, when assessing the policy options available to LICs it is important to take a long-term view. In the WIDER Working...
Historically, Chile has been an economy dominated by mineral and agro-industrial products and subject to frequent external shocks particularly in copper prices. Since the 1980s, the authorities have developed various mechanisms to cope with these...
This paper contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by looking at the ‘how’ of aid effectiveness. In other words it provides an assessment of whether aid only filled a financing gap or whether it, in addition, helped influence the political...
A dynamic relationship between foreign aid and domestic fiscal variables in Uganda is analysed using a cointegrated vector autoregressive model over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid is a significant element of long-run fiscal equilibrium...
In the wake of the current financial and economic crises, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa find themselves squeezed between likely reductions in official development assistance and the pressing challenge to eradicate poverty. Public expenditure...
This study examines the role of politics on decentralization and service delivery in South Africa, with a specific focus on Johannesburg and Cape Town. The research delineates how national decentralization has affected service delivery...
This paper sets out to provide an introduction to two sets of questions, and to some relevant literature that has tried to answer them. The first set of questions concern what determines growth in low-income countries, and how the answers are...
The South African constitution is considered progressive and transformative in intention due to its inclusion of socioeconomic rights, such as the...
Substantial amounts of debt relief have been granted to a set of low-income countries, as an alternative aid modality. Although the theoretical case for debt relief is firmly established, only empirical analysis can show whether debt relief is indeed...
Most small island economies or ‘microstates’ have distinctly different characteristics from larger developing economies. They are more open and vulnerable to external and environmental shocks, resulting in high output volatility. Most of them also...
Reform in Eastern Europe provides a comprehensive, accessible statement of reform policy that stands in the mainstream of modern Western economics. Based on their experience with stabilization policies in other countries, the authors show how Eastern...
Reform in Eastern Europe provides a comprehensive, accessible statement of reform policy that stands in the mainstream of modern Western economics. Based on their experience with stabilization policies in other countries, the authors show how Eastern...
Reducing or writing off the debts of the 41 heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) can potentially reduce social conflict by releasing resources from debt-service to enable governments to make fiscal transfers that lower the grievances of rebels...
This paper analyses the relationship between public sector borrowing and foreign development aid. It is concerned specifically with the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid, questioning the assumption that aid and this type of borrowing are...
Part of Book The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries
Part of Book Institutional Change and Economic Development
The gradual introduction of market reforms in China since 1978 and their subsequent massive and rapid adoption in the former Soviet bloc triggered an intense debate on the factors and policies which promote a smooth transition to a market economy...
The fourteen members of the African CFA Franc Zone represent the largest monetary unions in the southern hemisphere, predating the European Monetary Union by decades. With monetary unions planned for other parts of Africa in the near future, this...
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. This work was carried out by the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mozambique in collaboration with the project partners in the...
Multiactor global funds (MGFs) are emerging as important new mechanisms for the financing of development and other global priorities. MGFs like the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are distinctive because they are administered and...
In 1991 the Ethiopian Revolution Democratic Front (EPRDF) toppled the old ‘socialist’ regime that had ruled the country for seventeen years. In contrast to the previous policy regime of hard control, EPRDF initiated a wide range of reforms that...
This paper studies the postwar economic and political reconstruction in Lebanon. The paper shows that the ‘reconstruction boom’ was short-lived. The economy experienced a growth trap early in the reconstruction period, and entered a cyclical crisis...
China’s current fiscal system is largely decentralized while its governance structure is rather centralized with strong top-down mandates and a homogenous governance structure. Due to large differences in initial economic structures and revenue bases...
New institutional economics lacks a theory of state formation which could help us to deal with the mega question of why some states became more efficient than others at establishing and sustaining institutions. Some kind of middle range theory could...
Part of Journal Special Issue Migration Governance and Policy in the Global South
This paper reviews the challenges and experiences in rebuilding fiscal institutions in postconflict environments, based on advice from the IMF's Fiscal Affairs Department to selected countries. The recommended strategy involved a three-step process...
This paper examines macroeconomic performance and policies in small Pacific island economies (SPIEs). These economies are highly prone to various supply shocks and face severe obstacles to development arising from their geography and demography...
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. This work was carried out by the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mozambique in collaboration with the project partners in the...
Several countries in Africa – including Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda - have recently discovered large oil and gas or other mineral...
In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been...
The paper uses an aid disaggregation approach to examine the impact of different types of aid on the fiscal sector of the aid-recipient country. It uses time-series data on different types of aid (project aid, programme aid, technical assistance and...
This paper represents a first attempt to study China’s business cycles using a formal analytical framework, namely, a structural VAR model. It is found that: (a) demand shocks were the dominant source of macroeconomic fluctuations, but supply shocks...
This paper assesses the feasibility of developing a tax and benefit microsimulation model in Mozambique. Mozambique’s National Development Strategy 2015–35 commits to providing social security to three-quarters of poor and vulnerable households by...
In order to implement clean energy transition programmes, the national and sub-national governments in Nigeria will incur some cost. In the same way, failure to implement the policies will come with some costs. This paper therefore considers the...
Debt relief and the scaling up of aid to low-income countries should allow for greater fiscal space for expenditure programmes to create long-term growth and lower poverty rates. But designing a suitable medium-term fiscal framework that fosters a...
To finance basic pro-poor services, the Government of Ghana must mobilize more public revenue. But tax reform has been highly controversial in Ghana. An attempt to introduce VAT in 1995 failed after widespread protests. Although a second attempt to...
After more than a decade of economic decline and civil war, Uganda was able to return to economic growth thanks to the policies pursued by Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which elicited considerable donor support. They include macroeconomic...
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d’Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d’Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical...
This paper considers lessons from the practice of fiscal federalism for guidance on new approaches to development finance. Despite the fact that inter-regional redistribution in a federation relies on a central government with strong fiscal powers...
In analysing proposals for new sources of development funding, there are several issues that arise across the board. What is the role of new sources in relation to existing overseas development assistance? Should we be seeking new sources that...
This paper looks at public sector debt in developing countries, being concerned specifically with the relationship between aid inflows and the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid loans. After examining the public sector budget constraint...
For many emerging market economies, over reliance on monetary policy may bring worse macro results, when compared to a more balanced framework of countercyclical fiscal and monetary policy. The use of countercyclical fiscal policy requires as a...
Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the...
The Kenyan economy had a growth of –0.3 per cent in the year 2001, the lowest growth in the post-independence era. The dismal growth performance coincided with the period when the government was involved in grassroot consultations with civil society...
Part of Journal Special Issue Symposium on Spatial Inequality in Latin America
by Nora Lustig Latin America went through a severe economic recession in the 1980s, and crises erupted again in the 1990s, most notably Mexico and...
Robert Darko Osei As the country’s oil production shifts into gear, Ghana’s new status as a middle-income country is bound to see a reduction in...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid Policy and the Macroeconomic Management of Aid
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Fiscal policy is critical to the development of poor countries. Public spending on pro-poor services and public goods must be increased, tax revenues must be mobilized, and macro-economic stabilization must be achieved without inhibiting growth...
This paper assesses recent theorising and empirical evidence on the impact of fiscal policy—taxes, public expenditures and budget deficits—on long-run growth. It considers the relevance of recent advances in growth theory for low-income countries and...
The paper examines two issues associated with aid and fiscal policy. First, how best the conditionality behind foreign aid, sometimes non-economic, is complied with in a principal-agent framework. In a multiple task and multiple principal framework...
Part of Journal Special Issue Focus
Part of Book Vulnerability in Developing Countries
Part of Book New Sources of Development Finance
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Aid
In 1991, the new Government of Ethiopia faced a triple fiscal challenge. First, a major effort was required to overhaul and modernize the tax system. Second, the need to switch expenditure from military to civilian uses had to take place within a...
Of the 41 HIPCs, 11 are classified by the IMF and World Bank as conflict-affected. Can debt relief reduce the level of violent conflict in these countries? By providing additional resources to finance broad-based public spending, debt relief could...
It is clear from the implications of growth theory that the impact of aid depends on how it affects savings, investment and government behaviour. In respect of low-income countries, which are the principal aid recipients and the economies for which...
The ethnic conflicts in Burundi and Rwanda have severely weakened the economies and worsened the structural fiscal imbalances of these countries. Government revenue has declined due to the erosion of the tax base and tax administration capacity. At...
For many low-income countries, there has been an extended period in which fiscal policy was not a choice, or was a choice made by authorities external to the country. For a number of them, this situation is now changing. Their own success in...
This paper traces the origins of HIPC debt sustainability targets. These targets are interpreted as ‘switching values’, below which countries are expected to avoid debt service problems, but as such, they do not take into account that countries...
This paper considers some aspects of the effects of fiscal policy on macroeconomic adjustment in developing countries. First, the paper reviews the notion of the fiscal deficit in the particular context of developing countries. It then spells out the...
In this overview we try to explain, first, why funds continued to flow towards emerging economies while fundamentals in host countries had been deteriorating before the Asian crisis (rising external deficit, with a significant liquid component...
The study is an empirical test of the effects of different categories of government expenditure, revenue and deficits on economic growth in developing countries. It is based on panel data of annual series over the last three decades for 103 countries...
Tanzania has during the past years made substantial progress in stabilising the economy. One of the major issues has been to cut down on government activities and there has been a remarkable contraction. Although tax reform has been an important...
This paper discusses the design of tax systems in developing countries, with particular emphasis on low-income countries. It outlines the directions of reform that many low-income countries have followed, often on the advice of the IMF or the World...
This paper analyses the impact of fiscal policy on private investment for a sample of thirty-three LDCs. The paper makes a number of important contributions to the existing empirical literature. Its main contribution is that it is the first attempt...
Political violence, coup d’état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues...
This study evaluates the impact of the over seventy Social Funds (SFs) which were introduced since the mid-1980s to offset the surge in poverty spurred by adjustment. SFs benefited from greater visibility and financial support by the donor community...
Fiscal policy is critical to the development of poor countries. Public spending on pro-poor services and public goods must be increased, tax revenues must be mobilized, and macro-economic stabilization must be achieved without inhibiting growth...
This paper examines empirical evidence on the volatility and uncertainty of aid flows, and the main policy implications. Aid is found to be more volatile than fiscal revenues—particularly in highly aid-dependent countries—and mildly procyclical in...
Conflicts within the Malaysian federation have been rooted in socio-economic disparities and the struggle for control of natural resource rents, which State Governments previously had exclusive control over, as originally provided for by the federal...
In this paper we discuss monetary and fiscal policy issues facing heavily-indebted poor countries (HIPCs) who receive debt reduction via the enhanced HIPC initiative. This debt relief program is distinguished from previous ones by its conditionality...
The decline, or stagnation, in broad-based social expenditure, so crucial to the well being of mother and child, occurs because of various reasons. First, the government may derive less utility from this category of expenditure, compared to spending...
Building on recent work in the fiscal response literature, the present paper develops a new fiscal response model, which, for the first time in the relevant literature, combines the ideas of both endogenous and disaggregated aid. We endogenized aid...
The present paper examines the impact of different aid types, namely project aid, programme aid, technical assistance and food aid on the fiscal sector of the aid-recipient economy by using time-series data for Côte d’Ivoire over the period 1975–99...
In this paper, I discuss the incentives that the HIPC Initiative could create in debtor countries in favour of economic adjustment and reform. The usual debt-overhang argument, stating that debt relief will increase the net benefits of reforms, needs...
Sector investment programmes have become a common tool in development assistance. However, their contribution to national growth of production and poverty reduction has been less investigated. The sector investments can be seen as a part of national...
This paper examines the country specific effect of policy reform on infrastructure spending in China and India. In China we have examined how marketization and decentralization has affected the composition of provincial public expenditure and in the...
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d'Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d'Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical...
Part of Book Fiscal Policy for Development
Part of Book Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization
Part of Book From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue WIDER Symposium on Analyzing the Socioeconomic Consequences of Rising Inequality in China
Part of Journal Special Issue The CFA Franc Zone 10 Years After Devaluation
Part of Book The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries
Recent work on the relationship between tax structure and economic growth has offered little reliable evidence for developing countries. Yet it is in such countries where the greatest changes in tax structure not only have been seen over the past 30...
by Tony Addison An effective state is characterized by an ability to mobilize revenue and to spend it on infrastructure, services, and public goods...
by Patrick Karl O’Brien ‘Good’ institutions have become a core ingredient of most modern day explanations of economic growth and development. The...
As the country’s oil production shifts into gear, Ghana’s new status as a middle-income country is bound to see a reduction in official development assistance (ODA) in the medium to long term. This emerging oil industry will most likely provide a...
It is predicted that the global financial crisis will negatively affect developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa both through a reduction in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) caused by the shrinking (or stagnating) of the economies of many...
In the WIDER Working Paper 'Aid and the Fiscal and Monetary Responses to Dutch Disease' Alan Roe looks at the ways in which aid-induced, and mineral export-induced Dutch Disease (DD) are similar, and the ways in which they differ. He argues that many...
Donors are concerned about how their aid is used, especially how it affects public spending. For low-income countries that receive significant amounts of aid relative to GDP, most of the aid spent in the country is given to the government either...
Three major phases of economic policy can be distinguished between 1980 and 1985: from 1980 to 1982, when the government reacted to deteriorating external conditions (the debt crisis and world recession) by liberalizing imports, relaxing fiscal...
Argentina has had successive stabs at stabilization since the mid-1970s. Throughout most of this time it has had to wrestle with acute problems of hyperinflation, capital flight, rising external debt, a stop-go pattern of output, and for a long time...
27 August 2014 Vladimir Popov Modern economic growth started in the West, not because of the efficiency of various capitalist institutions...
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson In an earlier article I reviewed a number of the high-profile contributions to the September 2014 conference on...
This study assesses the fiscal and monetary management challenges that can be associated with large inflows of foreign aid. It provides a brief overview of the literature on Dutch Disease (DD) as applied to mineral wealth and then assesses the...
This study provides an analysis of the aid-private capital flows-growth nexus for Ghana. It is premised on the argument that Ghana’s new status as a middle income country plus the start of oil production is bound to result in a reduction in ODA...
Donors are concerned about how their aid is used, especially how it affects fiscal behaviour by recipient governments. This study reviews the recent evidence on the effects of aid on government spending and tax effort in recipient countries...
Large-scale business subsidies tied to national industrial development promotion programmes are notoriously difficult to study and are often inseparable from the political economy of large government programmes. We use the Tunisian national firm...
The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new panel of individual tax returns and the phenomenon of...
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. The report describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions...
The paper examines a wide range of issues relating to the mix between loans and grants as well as the degree of concessionality of loans. A number of empirical tests are carried out based on annual panel data over 1970 to 1999 for 22 donor countries...
This paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019. The results show that public debt responds positively, demonstrating a...
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic outcomes. This impact is quantified by calculating fiscal multipliers. A...
Much of the research on the impact of fiscal policy shocks on macroeconomic outcomes (e.g., fiscal multipliers) uses reduced-form modelling approaches such as vector auto-regressions to obtain empirical results. In a recent study1, we used this...
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy)...
Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true...
The management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges. In this paper, we argue that the standard policy advice to managers of resource revenues has been dominated by short-termism and the lack of a perspective...
Fragile and conflict-affected states, like Sierra Leone, can maintain a strong public financial management structure if they are able to find foreign support for administrative capacity and sufficient domestic political and executive support. PFM...
Part of Journal Special Issue Explaining Violent Conflict
A critical requirement for efficient fiscal policy is a reliable understanding of its impact on the aggregate economy for different policy instruments and under different economic conditions. Indeed, there is strong evidence to suggest that fiscal...
This paper discusses the rationale and options for a fiscal anchor for South Africa and its potential for restoring and maintaining fiscal sustainability. It argues that a well designed fiscal anchor can be useful in the current fiscal milieu, but...
Foreign aid is a significant element of Uganda’s long-run fiscal system. Aid is associated with increased tax collection effort and public spending in Uganda. Development assistance is also associated with reduced domestic borrowing in Uganda. Aid is...
In the WIDER Working Paper ‘Vertical Decentralization and Urban Service Delivery in South Africa: Does Politics Matter?’ Robert Cameron looks at the ways in which politics affects decentralization and service delivery in South Africa. To do this he...
Even the most optimistic analyses accept that many low-income countries (LICs) will remain low income for some time to come. Consequently, when assessing the policy options available to LICs it is important to take a long term view. In the WIDER...
Parts of Uganda that had centralised political systems before colonial rule are more likely to have higher rates of voluntary tax compliance. Merima...
Part of Journal Special Issue Foreign Aid Heterogeneity
Part of Book From Capital Surges to Drought
Part of Book From Conflict to Recovery in Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue Development Financing
Part of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy
Part of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy
Part of Book Financial Openness and National Autonomy