It is generally acknowledged that the government’s output is difficult to define and its value is hard to measure. The practical solution, adopted by national accounts systems, is to equate output to input costs. However, several studies estimate significant inefficiencies in government...

We document the immediate and permanent impoverishment effect derived from the pure accounting of cutting government expenditure. We calculate the size of this effect for European countries during the fiscal consolidation occurred in 2008-11 and for the next 20 years. The results suggest that...

Frankel and Rose (1998) reassessed the Mundellian criteria on OCAs and considered their application to be untenable, since trade integration and cycle synchronisation may be endogenous. This research aims at testing this hypothesis for Mercosur countries. In particular it intends to evaluate...

This paper presents new evidence on the behavior of saving in the world, by extending previous empirical research in five dimensions. First, it is based on a very large and recent database, covering 165 countries from 1981 to 2012. Second, it conducts a robustness analysis across different...

Over the past decade, rising oil prices have translated into high levels of public investment in most MENA and CCA oil exporters. This has prompted questions about the efficiency of public investment in generating growth and closing infrastructure gaps, as well as concerns about fiscal...

Output gap estimates are subject to a wide range of uncertainty owing to data revisions and the difficulty in distinguishing between cycle and trend in real time. This is important given the central role in monetary policy of assessments of economic activity relative to capacity. We show that...

The measurement of the efficiency of public education expenditure using parametric and non-parametric methods has proven challenging. This paper seeks to overcome the difficulties of earlier studies by using a hybrid approach to measure the efficiency of secondary education spending in emerging...

Frankel and Rose (1998) reassessed the Mundellian criteria on OCAs and considered their application to be untenable, since trade integration and cycle synchronisation may be endogenous. This research aims at testing this hypothesis for Mercosur countries. In particular it intends to evaluate...

Good practice suggests that budget allocations should reflect spending priorities and that spending should provide cost-effective delivery of public goods and services. This paper analyzes the composition of public expenditure in the Slovak Republic. It also assesses the relative efficiency of...