The 1980s were a decade of tax reform across OECD countries. The changes had many common themes. Top rates of personal income tax and rates of corporate income tax fell, but revenues were maintained by broadening the bases of these taxes. Seven countries introduced a value-added tax. Many...

The failure of key EU Member States to respect the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) a few years after its inception triggered a heated debate on how to reform the framework of fiscal policy coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyzes 101 reform...

The cyclically adjusted budget balance (CAB) plays a key role in the EU fi scal surveillance framework. It started off in a supporting role in the shadow of the headline defi cit and, before long, turned into the linchpin of the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact. The steep ascent was driven...

The study utilizes data on major Indian states for 1980-2004 to explore the impact of political competition on state-level income and fiscal variables. The findings suggest that increase in political competition leads to an increase in state per capita income and growth. Focusing on fiscal...

Wagner’s Law is the first model of public spending in the history of public finance. The aim of this article is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960-2008 at a disaggregated level, using a time-series approach. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic...

In an article in the American Economic Review, Jonathan R. Kesselman, Samuel H. Williamson and Ernst R. Berndt presented a Table showing the effect of substituting a marginal employment tax credit (METC)for the investment tax credit (ITC) over the 1962 to 1971 period. Their METC was defined in...

This article examines fiscal policy shocks in the UK through using a Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) model which applies Mountford and Uhlig (2009) type sign-restriction. It investigates the impact of three fiscal policy experiments on macroeconomic variable. Specifically, the...

Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

Para lograr un adecuado equilibrio social y consolidar el funcionamiento del sistema democrático, los países han de contar con sistemas fiscales equitativos que favorezcan el desarrollo económico, que tengan capacidad recaudatoria para financiar un nivel adecuado de gasto público y con...

This Country Program Evaluation (RE-355) analyzes the recent performance of the Bank's portfolio of operations. Two country strategies were approved during 2000-2008, which were prepared in two very different contexts in Brazil. The 2000-2003 strategy was prepared following the 1999 crisis that...