Fiscal sustainability refers to a government's capacity to generate sufficient revenue to cover its expenses and repay its debts without accumulating excessive liabilities or creating new money. Recent observations indicate that Kenya's economic growth has slowed, prompting concerns about its...

New Zealand's population is ageing. Public spending on public pensions (NZ Superannuation) and health are particularly sensitive to this trend and are expected to increase accordingly. Current and future government policies aimed at addressing this challenge will not only influence macroeconomic...

Too many children in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are missing out on education, limiting the country’s ability to develop its human capital and achieve sustained economic growth. Nearly one in four children of primary or secondary school age is not attending school. Among those who are enrolled,...

This Note describes methods for estimating potential fiscal savings across five spending categories—the wage bill, pension payments, capital spending, purchases of goods and services, and social protection spending. The primary methodology compares a country’s spending levels to specific...

This study examines public debt sustainability in the Eurozone by estimating fiscal reaction functions that assess how fiscal balances respond to rising public debt under heterogeneous macroeconomic conditions. Using annual panel data for 20 EU countries from 2000 to 2024, we employ fixed...

This study examines the impact of key governance dimensions on public budget rationalization in Palestine from 2002 to 2023. Utilizing Legitimacy Theory, the research assesses how institutional quality affects fiscal outcomes, including revenues, expenditures, net lending, and budget balance....

For the 2028-2034 European Union budget (Multiannual Financial Framework, MFF), the European Commission has proposed to integrate cohesion, agricultural, migration and security policies - until now, standalone budget components - into a single framework, structured around National and Regional...

Using cross-country data for 167 countries with broad post-World War II coverage and historical extensions to earlier periods, we quantify how deficits, taxes, and civilian spending respond to increases and decreases in military spending. On average, deficit financing dominates: a 1 percent-age...

The funding available to a government determines the choices available to it - including what public services and benefits to provide, whether to charge co-payments for services, and if so at what level. Such choices especially affect households on low and middle incomes, and particularly those...

The central contention of this report is that the UK fiscal framework has some desirable features but is not delivering good outcomes. We are in a bad equilibrium. The UK's fiscal framework is based around a set of pass-fail, numerical fiscal rules. The fiscal debate is overly fixated on the...

Using quarterly data for the period Q1:2000–Q4:2024, the study examines whether elections in EU‑27 member states shape the composition and timing of fiscal policy strategies, and how political, fiscal and institutional constraints condition these dynamics. Employing a two‑way...

The Scottish Budget and Spending Review published on 13 January set detailed spending plans for 2026-27, alongside higher-level plans for the following two years for day-to-day (resource) spending and the following three years for investment (capital) spending. Understandably, the Scottish...

Financial risk management is increasingly central to fiscal policy in volatile and highly open economies. This paper assesses the fiscal risk management system of the Republic of Moldova using a SWOT framework complemented by a TOWS strategy matrix (SO, ST, WO, WT). The analysis relies on...

This study explores the relationship between geopolitical risk and fiscal-budgetary stability of countries, focusing on how external instability impacts the dynamics of the budget deficit. Using a dynamic System GMM (Arellano-Bover/Blundell-Bond) model on a panel dataset of 25 OECD member...

This report builds on a joint WHO-World Bank initiative on budget execution challenges (described in more detail in Appendix 1). Following the introduction, section 2 provides an overview of core concepts from both a public financial management perspective and a health financing perspective and...

Improving domestic revenue mobilization extremely important for Zimbabwe to create the fiscal space to absorb quasi-fiscal expenditures and support macroeconomic stability. In November 2023, Zimbabwe announced measures to raise additional tax revenue. This included limiting value-added tax (VAT)...

Purpose This study explores the effect of local budget retention rate changes (RER) on total factor productivity (TFP) and its components in Vietnam. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a two-system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator and data from 2012 to 2019 across all 63...

This study examines the implications of future enlargements for the next MFF. It reviews adjustments made to the EU budget during past enlargements and estimates the budgetary costs of the accession of all current candidate and potential candidate countries (excluding Türkiye) under three...

This study examines the implications of future enlargements for the next MFF. It reviews adjustments made to the EU budget during past enlargements and estimates the budgetary costs of the accession of all current candidate and potential candidate countries (excluding Türkiye) under three...

Deutschland gilt im internationalen Vergleich als Nachzügler in Sachen wirkungsorientierter Haushaltsführung. Zwar hat der Bund seit den 2000er Jahren Fortschritte auf dem Weg zu einer stärker wirkungsorientierten Steuerung des Mitteleinsatzes gemacht. So besteht beispielsweise eine...

This report proposes a framework in tagging nutrition expenditures of national government agencies. The framework was developed through exhaustive literature review and validation sessions with government agencies. It comprised of five levels (5) of classification elements namely: major...

In 2016, Pakistan adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into its national development agenda as part of its commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Universal Health Coverage (UHC). In 2018, the Government of Pakistan designed and approved a National SDGs Framework to prioritize and localize...

Through fiscal reaction functions, we investigate fiscal sustainability for five European country-group panels and check for a change in fiscal behaviour after countries adopted the euro as their currency. Using annual data for the period between 1990 and 2021, we identify evidence of average...

In the official models for projections and policy analysis used by the Treasury and the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, many key variables are assumed as a continuation of past trends. Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), with more sophisticated models, makes certain simplifying...

Der Bundeshaushalt muss Zukunftsinvestitionen stärker priorisieren. Darüber besteht in der Theorie ein weit reichender Konsens. In der haushaltspolitischen Praxis ist es hingegen schwierig, dieses Ziel durchzusetzen. Ausgaben mit einem unmittelbaren Gegenwartsnutzen erfahren regelmäßig hohen...

This paper investigates fiscal sustainability and the prevailing fiscal regime in the Federal Republic of Germany. Using annual data from 1950 to 2023, the long-term relationship between the primary balance and government debt is estimated using a single-equation error correction model (SECM)....

This paper studies how legislative institutions shape distributive policy outcomes. Specifically, I analyze the effect of budget committee membership in the German Bundestag using a novel dataset of 4,629 geocoded federal grants (1999- 2023). Employing a within-legislator...

This paper investigates whether political partisanship and political narratives affect voters' opinions about public finances. In a novel survey experiment, we test the causal effect of pro-consolidation and pro-public investment narratives used in German general election campaigns on...

Wofür gibt der Bund die zur Verfügung stehenden Einnahmen aus? Die Antwort hängt nicht nur von den politischen Präferenzen der Volksvertreter ab, sondern auch von den gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, wie sich die Ausgaben des...

This guide identifies what makes a PFM system responsive to nutrition needs, and what actions can be taken to develop a reform program in a capacity constrained context. Across the stages in the budgetcycle it identifies basic requirements that are necessary for a nutrition responsive PFM reform...

The Lao People's Democratic Republic has a high execution rate for its overall health budget, ranging from 89 to 104 percent from 2015 to 2019. Aggregated execution rates are generally high across the main categories of spending - wage, non-wage recurrent and capital with only a couple of...