It is commonly agreed that economic policies, including budgetary policies, can have potentially strong distributional effects. Traditional economic analysis held that economic policies affected the income distribution primarily through their impact on the rate of growth. More recently, it has...

The primary mandate of a national Treasury is to promote an optimal financial management of government resources, by ensuring that spending agencies are provided, in a timely manner, the resources needed for a smooth provision of public services, while minimizing the cost of government...

The literature on fiscal federalism has amply discussed both the potential efficiency and welfare gains from decentralization and the potential trade-offs between decentralization and income redistribution. By contrast, it has generally put less emphasis on the effects of decentralization on...

This paper reviews the role of fiscal policy in a number of stabilization programs in Latin America since the early 1980s. The paper highlights the importance of sustainable fiscal adjustment in stabilization efforts, and discusses the main issues that arise in this context. By reviewing the...

This paper reports the main findings of a pilot project launched in July 2014 by the IMF's Statistics Department to test augmenting the IMF's financial soundness indicators (FSIs) with concentration and distribution measures (CDMs) to capture tail risks, concentrations, variations in...