This paper develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze and derive simple budget rules in the face of volatile public revenue from natural resources in a low-income country like Niger. The simulation results suggest three policy lessons or rules of thumb. When a resource...

Noting that South Africa may be one of the few African countries that could contribute to mitigating climate change, the authors explore the impact of a carbon tax relative to alternative energy taxes on economic welfare. Using a disaggregate general-equilibrium model of the South African...

Devarajan, Go, Page, Robinson, and Thierfelder argued that if aid is about the future and recipients are able to plan consumption and investment decisions optimally over time, then the potential problem of an aid-induced appreciation of the real exchange rate (Dutch disease) does not occur. In...

The authors show how two-sector models can be used to derive policy lessons about adjustment in developing economies. In the past two decades, changes in the external environment and in economic policies have been the key factors in the performance of developing economies. By and large the...

The authors review the arguments for taxing imports, considering two cases: one in which a country has market power in the export commodity, and one in which it does not. They conclude that for countries having market share there are strong analytical and practical arguments for an export tax....

After an impressive acceleration in growth and poverty reduction since the mid-1990s, many African countries continue to register robust growth in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Will this growth persist, given the tepid recovery in developed countries, numerous weather shocks, and...

Using a tax model of an open economy, the authors provide a simple but rigorous method for estimating the fiscal impact of trade reform. Both the direction and the magnitude of the fiscal consequences of trade reform depend on the elasticities of substitution and transformation between foreign...

We use a general equilibrium model to analyse the employment effects and fiscal cost of a wage subsidy in South Africa. We capture the structural characteristics of the labour market with several labour categories and substitution possibilities, linking the economy-wide results to a...

This paper uses a three-step Bayesian cross-entropy estimation approach in an environment of noisy and scarce data to estimate behavioral parameters for a computable general equilibrium model. The estimation also measures how labor-augmenting productivity and other structural parameters in the...