Chile’s regulatory framework is working reasonably well. The country’s structural reforms since the 1980s, with the privatisation of utilities and deregulation of product and labour markets, have improved resource allocation and increased the population’s access to basic services, while...

Indonesia has made considerable progress over the years in improving the social conditions of its population, especially among disadvantaged groups, not least by raising government spending and strengthening social protection programmes. Nevertheless, in some respects social outcomes remain...

This paper provides cross-country empirical evidence on the productivity of bank transaction taxes (BTTs). Our data set comprises six Latin American countries that have levied BTTs since the late 1980s: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. We find that, for a given tax rate,...

Labour force participation is comparable to the OECD area for prime-age males. It is somewhat lower for females and is trending down for youths as a result of rising school enrolment. The labour market is placing an increasing premium on skills, making it particularly difficult for the less...

The Indonesian labour market is characterised by widespread informality. To some extent, these outcomes can be attributed to a sharp increase in the real value of the minimum wage since 2001, when minimum-wage setting was decentralised to the provincial governments. To test this hypothesis, this...

A good framework for investment in innovation can contribute to increasing Chile’s growth potential. Spending on R&D is currently low in relation to GDP and heavily reliant on government financing. Innovation activity in the business sector is also limited by insufficient seed and venture...

This paper develops a differential game of tax avoidance by modelling the interactions between a taxpayer and the tax authority. This framework is particularly useful for explicitly modelling situations of conflict. The solution to the game is a non-co-operative Nash that depends on the...

Indonesia’s growth performance is improving, following a slow recovery from the 1997-98 financial crisis. Investment is picking up, despite considerable business-climate obstacles to entrepreneurship. Unemployment remains high, and labour informality is pervasive. Fiscal policy has been...

This paper tests the hypothesis that, by giving people more voice in the government decision-making process, fiscal decentralisation fosters social capital, measured in terms of interpersonal trust. Empirical evidence based on World Values Survey data and seemingly unrelated probit estimations...

This paper tests for horizontal tax competition in the VAT for a sample of Brazilian states in the period 1985-2001. The states have considerable autonomy to set their VAT rates and bases, often using this tax as an industrial policy tool. The empirical findings, based on the estimation of a tax...