This paper provides an analysis of the cyclical stance of fiscal policy in Latin America. Its contributions include developing a new measure of the cyclicality of fiscal policy, careful analysis of the statistical significance of results, and accounting for the effect of commodity prices on...

This paper provides an overview of full and partial allowance for corporate equity (ACE) tax systems in practice. In the recent past, ACE systems have been used in Austria, Croatia, and Italy. Brazil still applies a variant of such a system and Belgium introduced one this year. This paper...

This paper extends the effective average tax rate (EATR) developed in Devereux and Griffith (2003) by relaxing the assumption of a one-period perturbation in the capital stock. Instead it allows a permanent investment. While this may appear a small change, it has important implications. First,...

This paper considers two empirical questions about tax incentives: (1) are incentives used as tools of tax competition and (2) how effective are incentives in attracting investment? To answer these, we prepared a new dataset of tax incentives in over 40 Latin American, Caribbean and African...

This paper provides an updated overview of tax incentives for business investment. It begins by noting that tax competition is likely to be a major force driving countries'' tax reforms, and discusses tax incentives as a possible response to this. This is complemented by other arguments for and...

Current account deficits imply increasing liabilities to the rest of the world. External sustainability then depends on whether these can be met in the future without defaulting, i.e., normally through trade account surpluses. To run such surpluses without a fall in consumption, capital inflows...

This paper assembles a new dataset on corporate income tax regimes in 50 emerging and developing economies over 1996-2007 and analyzes their impact on corporate tax revenues and domestic and foreign investment. It computes effective tax rates to take account of complicated special regimes, such...