Real wage declines have been common in the public sector in many countries over substantial periods of time. In several cases, such wage reductions have coincided with a decline in the efficiency of the public sector. In a simple analytical framework, it is shown that higher wage levels alter...

Although the deficit is a useful construct for Keynesian analyses of fiscal policy, the deficit appears to be a less useful measure of fiscal policy within all but a restricted class of intertemporal neoclassical models. This paper suggests that the nature of deficits in a simple certainty model...

Much of the recent research of the international economic consequences of budget deficit has been conducted under the assumption that taxes are lump sum. It has thus abstracted from important issues that arise in the context of distortionary tax systems. Our analysis deals with the international...

General government deficit is defined as the balance of income and expenditure of government, including capital income and capital expenditures. "Net lending" means that government has a surplus, and is providing financial resources to other sectors, while "net borrowing" means that government...

This paper presents an update to the Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) on Fiscal Transparency Module for the Republic of Poland. The original ROSC concluded that boundaries of the general government were well defined by the public finance law, but proliferation of...

This paper focuses on the Republic of Lithuania’s Third Review Under the Stand-By Arrangement. Program implementation has been good and all end-December 2002 quantitative performance criteria were met. Macroeconomic performance in 2002 was better than expected: real GDP grew by 5.9...