The global economic crisis has triggered rapid responses by governments worldwide to counteract its domestic effects, through fiscal stimulus packages, expansionary monetary policies, and financial bailouts. Ad hoc trade policy measures are increasingly being put in place. All countries share...

Domestic consumption in most countries is taxed through general sales taxes, excise taxes on specific commodities, and a variety of miscellaneous taxes on such services as hotels and transfers of property. This note considers only the first two of these categories, with particular attention to...

A recent paper argues persuasively that the two basic pillars of taxation in most countries are the income tax and the VAT (Barreix and Roca 2007). The authors argue that the VAT is excellent as a revenue raiser and works best if it is applied in the simplest and most neutral fashion possible...

Economists are sometimes accused of agreeing on almost nothing. An important policy question on which many economists appear to agree, however, is that there is not much to be said in favor of taxing business and especially not internationally mobile corporations. The reason for such unanimity...

Poverty studies typically focus on people who live below the poverty line. Few studies have examined how people are able to not only move out of but also stay out of poverty. The fifteen, country study, moving out of poverty: success from the bottom up, by Deepa Narayan, Lant Pritchett, and...

While the term 'fiscal space' is new, the issue is quite old. Fiscal space refers to availability of budgetary resources for a specific purpose, typically growth-enhancing investment uses, without jeopardizing the sustainability of the government's financial position, or the stability of the...

The world has witnessed an impressive increase in trade over the past four decades. World merchandise trade increased from US$217 billion in 1962 to US$22.8 trillion in 2006. While industrialized countries accounted for the vast majority of this growth, between 1985 and 2006, developing...

Many developing countries operate geographically delineated economic areas in the form of export processing zones, special industrial zones, or free trade zones. They experiment in these special economic zones (SEZs) with infrastructure, regulatory, and fiscal policies that are different from...

The current gloom and doom about goods trade has obscured the quiet resilience of services trade. Services account for over one fifth of global cross-border trade, and for some countries such as India and the United States close to a third of all exports. New data on cross-border trade from the...

This note describes a framework for linking fiscal policy and growth issues in low-income countries. The framework has been developed in the context of a recently, completed Public Expenditure Management and Financial Accountability Review (PEMFAR) report in the Latin American and Caribbean...