The EU Services Directive was adopted in 2006 to foster competition in services across Europe. However, progress in liberalizing services has fallen short of expectations due to the article 15 of the Directive, which allows countries to maintain pre-existing restrictions if judged necessary to...

This paper re-examines the stock-flow discrepancies of government debt and deficits and correlation with fiscal transparency. Applying the fully integrated relationship between financial stocks and flows allows for a more refined analysis of the deterministic components that make up the...

Adoption of fiscal rules and fiscal councils continued to increase globally over the last decades based on two new global datasets. During the pandemic, fiscal frameworks were put to test. The widespread use of escape clauses was one of the novelties in this crisis, which helped provide policy...

This paper reviews the Public Financial Management (PFM) reform stategy for 16 Pacific Island Countries (PICs) during the period 2010-2020. The strategy was endorsed by the finance and economic ministers of the region (FEMM) in 2010. The paper analyzes more than 30 PEFA assessments carried out...

This paper investigates the impact of fiscal shocks on inflation, using a large panel of 139 countries over the period 1970–2021. First, both headline and core measures of inflation increase in response to expansionary shifts in the fiscal policy stance. Second, we split the sample and observe...

This paper investigates the performance of fiscal rules in resource-rich countries (RRC). Using panel data for 57 commodity exporting countries from 1976 to 2021, we find that fiscal rules: (i) reduce the procyclicality of real public expenditures with terms of trade in oil exporting countries,...