High and unsustainable public debt is an economic problem at the center of many emerging and developing economies. This paper investigates, for the period 1978-2017, how the Surinamese Government reacted to changes in public debt for the period 1978-2017 and assesses if fiscal policy was...

Governments can issue public debt for both good and bad reasons. The former include intertemporal tax smoothing, fiscal stimulus, and asset management. In contrast, the bad reasons, which generate higher indebtedness, are mainly associated with political cycles, rent capture, intergenerational...

This paper explores the qualitative and quantitative implications of optimal taxation in a developing economy when economic growth is endogenously determined. We differentiate this class of economies from a developed economy in two aspects: informal sector is quantitatively significant and...

Widening income disparities, higher corruption and larger informality in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDE) including Latin America, all with pressing and mounting fiscal problems, have rekindled interest in the empirical analysis of the key factors determining the occurrence...

Societies often rely on simple rules to restrict the size and behavior of governments. When fiscal and monetary policies are conducted by a discretionary and profligate government, I find that revenue ceilings vastly outperform debt, deficit and monetary rules, both in effectiveness at curbing...

This paper seeks to identify the most promising fiscal strategy to boost long-term economic growth in Argentina and quantify its effects. To this end, the authors updated a growth-diagnostics study for Argentina and corroborated that low appropriability of social returns and insufficient public...

This paper evaluates from a welfare perspective three policy alternatives for dealing with Dutch disease problems originating from cyclical movements in commodity prices: fiscal rules for government expenditures, capital controls, and taxes on domestic lending. A DSGE model of a small open...

Do voters punish governments that introduce fiscal "austerity" measures? If so, does voter response vary according to the design (composition) of fiscal adjustments? What determines the timing of fiscal consolidations? The empirical literature on the political economy of fiscal adjustments,...