Can the evolution of public debt be predicted from its determinants? While the recovery programs undertaken during the 2008 crisis have led to a big takeoff in public debt ratios, the factors likely to curb its upward spiraling dynamic are subject to considerable uncertainty and fuel debate...

Railways were one of the main engines of the Latin American trade boom before 1914. Railway construction often required financial support from local governments, which depended on their fiscal capacity. But since the main government revenues were trade-related, this generated a two-way feedback...

The question of reducing public debt is at the heart of the current debates in France where the level of debt ratio amounted to 86% of the GDP in 2011. In this paper, we examine how the primary balance, the GDP growth rate, the real interest rate and the inflation rate have influenced the...

Based on a dynamic open-economy macroeconomic model, this paper aims at understanding the contribution of domestic financial underdevelopment to foreign reserve accumulation in some emerging market economies, especially in China. It is argued that foreign reserve accumulation is part and parcel...

Episodes of large capital inflows in small open economies are often associated with a shift of resources from the tradable to the non-tradable sector and sometimes lead to balance-of-payments crises. This paper builds a two-sector dynamic model to study the evolution of the sectoral structure...

In this paper, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they decrease the market power (due to horizontal differentiation) of the financial intermediaries, lower the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the amount of intermediated savings,...

This article addresses the existence of a wide range of estimated government spending multipliers in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of the euro area. Our estimation results and counterfactual exercises provide evidence that omitting the interactions of key ingredients at the...

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1978 to 2009, we find that income inequality significantly rises during periods of fiscal consolidation. In addition, while fiscal policy that is driven by spending...

This paper studies the local dynamic properties of a simple general equilibrium model with Social VAT. Strict balanced budget rules often lead to real indeterminacy of aggregate equilibrium, leaving room for «sunspots» fluctuations. In a closed-economy setup, social VAT escapes this property...

This article analyses the impact of the electoral calendar on the composition of tax revenue (direct versus indirect taxes). It thus represents an extension of traditional political budget-cycle analyses assessing the impact of elections on overall revenue. Panel data from 56 developing...