In Morocco, the increasing public expenditure on essential sectors, such as education, does not always lead to improved outcomes, highlighting a significant gap between resource allocation and quality enhancement. This study examines the efficiency of public expenditure in education, health, and...

This paper empirically investigates the short- and long-term impact of public expenditure on economic growth. We use annual data from 28 European Union (EU) countries for the 1995-2022 period and estimate a growth model augmented for public expenditure employing the Autoregressive Distributed...

The main goal of the first-generation expenditure rules was to ensure fiscal discipline: preserving a sound fiscal framework and public debt sustainability. Regarding this goal, analytically as well as empirically, limiting the share of public expenditure in GDP would be more appropriate in case...

I investigate the social costs imposed by poor implementation of public infrastructure. Focusing on the period from 2005 to 2015 in Peru, when the government embarked on a nationwide initiative to expand sewerage systems, I leverage quasi-random variation in initiation of the implementation...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal policy in Grenada. Using data from the 2017-2018 Living Conditions and Household Budgets Survey and following the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) analysis framework, we estimate the effects of fiscal policy interventions on inequality and...

We perform a Meta-Regression Analysis (MRA) of the literature on government size and corruption, examining 450 empirical estimates retrieved from 44 primary papers published from 1998 to 2022. We find considerable heterogeneity in the results, mainly depending on whether the paper is published...

We examine the relationship between public sector efficiency and government spending, to assess public resource management across the 27 European Union countries. Specifically, we analyze the growth of public expenditure in relation to outcomes across various public sector performance (PSP)...

We provide experimental evidence on how fiscal news shapes households' expectations and spending behavior. Using a new survey of ~11,000 Korean individuals linked to automatically collected high-frequency spending data, we elicit respondents' fiscal and macroeconomic beliefs and randomly provide...

This paper investigates how external shocks propagate through fiscal transmission mechanisms in a commodity-dependent economy within a dynamic macroeconomic framework. The study contributes to the literature on macroeconomic fluctuations by examining the interaction between external revenue...

In this paper, we analyze the impacts of financial innovation and financial deepening on the economic growth of 14 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1995 to 2023. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach and error correction model (ECM) were used to assess short- and long-run...

This paper examines the effect of women’s political empowerment on public spending efficiency in developing countries. Using a large panel of 126 developing countries over 1995–2021, the paper constructs public spending efficiency scores based on Stochastic Frontier Analysis, capturing...

Despite Niger’s relatively high public spending on agriculture compared to regional peers, the impact on sector productivity and growth has been limited and uneven. This report, an agricultural public expenditure review combined with an analysis of price incentives for crop and livestock...

Attaining education sustainability is indeed important as it ensures the overall economic sustainability of countries and it is directly connected with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG-4). However, the literature evidence on the determinants of education sustainability is...

Ceremonies are central to social life, yet the pressure to conform to community spending norms traps households in a collectively suboptimal equilibrium, imposing severe financial burdens. Using nationally and regionally representative longitudinal data from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we...

Japanís prolonged ZLB period alongside substantial debt accumulation makes it a compelling laboratory for testing whether fiscal multipliers differ across normal and ZLB periods. This paper investigates this question using a sign- and zero-restricted TVP-VAR that jointly identifies fiscal rules...

The purpose of this note is to help mainstream fiscal multipliers in PFRs. It aims to provide guidance for estimating fiscal multipliers in developing countries by leveraging the World Bank’s macroeconomic and fiscal model (MFMod) to generate country-specific estimates. While other methods are...

The objective of the assessment is to take stock of the performance of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR’s) public finance management (PFM) system, assess progress since the 2018 Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessment, and inform the development of the Lao...

The Public Finance Review (PFR) for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) aims to support policymakers in strengthening medium-term fiscal frameworks and aligning fiscal policy with sustainable and inclusive growth. Against the backdrop of BiH’s highly decentralized governance structure, heightened...

This paper assesses the fiscal and distributional effects of personal income tax expenditures in Portugal using EUROMOD and 2022 EU-SILC microdata. We compare the 2023 tax-benefit system with a counterfactual scenario in which tax expenditures are removed to estimate first-round impacts. We find...

Environmental challenges increasingly shape political discourses across Europe, yet their influence on actual environmental governance remains unclear. This paper examines the political economy mechanisms linking environmental change, party platforms, and the decentralisation of environmental...

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...

There has been considerable recent debate about the terms of 'Plan 2' student loans, which were issued to 11 cohorts of English undergraduate university students: those who started their courses between academic years 2012/13 and 2022/23.1 We have written before about how these student loans...

Public services play an important role in supporting households' well-being and their members' life chances. This is especially true for low- and middle-income households, for whom the in-kind services received represent a larger share of overall consumption and for whom equivalent private...

Public services play an important role in supporting households' well-being and their residents' life chances. This is especially true for low- and middle-income households, for whom the in-kind services received represent a larger share of overall consumption, and for whom equivalent private...