This paper estimates the impact of public spending on the poor`s health status in over 70 countries. It provides evidence that the poor have significantly worse health status than the rich and that they are more favorably affected by public spending on health care. An important new result is...

This paper reexamines the relationship between aid and domestic tax revenues using a more recent and comprehensive dataset covering 118 countries for the period 1980 - 2009. Overall, our results support earlier findings of a negative association between net Official Development Assistance (ODA)...

This paper assesses the effects of fiscal consolidations associated with public debt reduction on medium-term output growth during periods of private debt deleveraging. The analysis covers 107 countries and 79 episodes of public debt reduction driven by discretionary fiscal adjustments during...

This paper uses a newly constructed revenue dataset of 35 resource-rich countries for the period 1992-2009 to analyze the impact of expanding resource revenues on different types of domestic (non resource) tax revenues. Overall, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between...

Distribution neutral fiscal policy refers to a structure of taxes and transfers that keep the income distribution unchanged even after positive or negative shocks to an economy. This is referred to as a Strong Pareto Superior (SPS) allocation which improves the standard Pareto criterion by...

This paper explores the impact of political and institutional variables on public investment. Working with a sample of 80 presidential and parliamentary democracies between 1975 and2012, we find that the rate of growth of public investment is higher at the beginning of electoral cycles and...

Using panel data from 120 developing countries from 1975 to 2000, this paper explores the direct and indirect channels linking social spending, human capital, and growth in a system of equations. The paper finds that both education and health spending have a positive and significant direct...

This paper studies the evolution of worldwide military spending during 1970-2018. It finds thatmilitary spending in relation to GDP is converging, but into three separate groups of countries. Inthe largest group, responsible for 90 percent of worldwide spending, outlays have remainedstubbornly...

We examine the short- and long-term movements of government spending relative to output in 51 countries. We find that in the short term, the main components of government spending increase with output in about half of the sample countries, with some variation across spending categories and...

This paper revisits the effects of corruption on the state's capacity to raise revenue, building on the existing empirical literature using new and more disaggregated data. We use a comprehensive dataset for 147 countries spanning 1995-2014, compiled by the IMF. It finds that-consistent with the...