This paper presents a new dataset of fiscal consolidation for 17 OECD economies during 1978-2009. We focus on discretionary changes in taxes and government spending primarily motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by a response to prospective economic conditions. To identify...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of fiscal consolidation on economic activity in OECD economies. We examine the historical record, including Budget Speeches and IMFdocuments, to identify changes in fiscal policy motivated by a desire to reduce the budget deficit and not by...

Empirical evidence for small developed economies finds that consumption is procyclical and as volatile as output, and real net exports are coutercyclical. Earlier studies have not been able to reproduce these regularities in a DSGE small open economy model when productivity shocks drive the...

A standard DSGE small open economy model can not generate the cyclical regularities of middle-income countries. It predicts excessive consumption smoothing, and procyclical, instead of countercyclical, real net exports. Previous studies have solved this problem by increasing the shocks’...

Using a novel empirical approach and an extensive dataset developed by the Fiscal Affairs Department of the IMF, we find no evidence of any particular debt threshold above which medium-term growth prospects are dramatically compromised. Furthermore, we find the debt trajectory can be as...

Recent studies conclude that the ongoing global financial integration may have had little or no value in advancing economic growth, especially in poor countries. Capital is often found to flow ""uphill"" from poor to rich countries. And, when it does flow into the less developed economies, it is...

This paper looks at the fiscal cost and distributional impact of implicit fuel price subsidies in Gabon, where fuel prices have remained largely unchanged since 2002. Using estimated implicit import parity prices, we evaluate the total fiscal cost of the subsidies at 3.2 percent of non-oil GDP...

This paper proposes a new method of estimating the Taylor rule with a time-varying implicit inflation target and a time-varying natural rate of interest. The inflation target and the natural rate are modeled as random walks and are estimated using maximum likelihood and the Kalman filter. I...