An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour. Traditional approaches to modelling fiscal effects are beset by theoretical and empirical problems. This paper applies techniques developed in the ‘macroeconometrics’ literature to estimate the dynamic linkages between aid and fiscal aggregat...

We investigate whether fiscal rules help to reduce the extent of policy procyclicalitydhow government expenditure policy responds to GDP– in a dynamic panel framework with 81 advanced, emerging and developing countries over 1985e2012. We construct two new fiscal rule indices and investigate whether rules help to dampen procyclical policies. We condition our empirical specifications on the degre...

While decentralization of fiscal responsibilities is one of the main objectives that has emerged in the agenda of national governments and international organizations, there is little empirical evidence of the potential benefits of this intervention. This paper is an attempt to fill, in part, the void of quantitative measurement. Using panel data on infant mortality rates, GDP per capita, and t...

An important feature of aid to developing countries is that it is given to the government. As a result, aid should be expected to affect fiscal behaviour, although theory and existing evidence is ambiguous regarding the nature of these effects. This paper applies techniques developed in the ‘macroeconometrics’ literature to estimate the dynamic linkages between aid and fiscal aggregates. Vector...

James Edwin Kee, Professor of Public Policy and Public Administration The George Washington University Abstract The last decade has seen a renewed interest in the concept of fiscal decentralization or fiscal federalism. This comes after a half-century of fiscal centralization in most developed and developing nations. This paper examines the theory behind fiscal decentralization and suggests the...

The international oil companies (IOCs) in Nigeria have expressed concern over the federal government’s intention to change the laws governing the oil and gas industry including the fiscal terms. They claim that the proposed fiscal terms will affect their bottom line and trigger uncertainties in their investments in the upstream sector. Therefore, this research was conducted with the aim of eval...

How should fiscal policy be conducted in the presence of default risk? We address this question using a sovereign default model with nominal rigidities. An increase in government spending during a recession stimulates economic activity and reduces unemployment. Because the government lacks commitment to future debt repayments, expansionary fiscal policy increases sovereign spreads, making the f...

Taxes and transfers can have significant impacts on poverty and inequality. All standard measures are by definition anonymous in the sense that we do not know the identity of winners and losers. That a given combination of taxes and transfers makes some of the poor poorer, however, may be important information to incorporate into a fiscal incidence analysis. The directional mobility literature ...

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our preliminary results suggest that more equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during t...

The district health system in Ghana today is characterized by high resource-uncertainty and narrow decision-space. This article builds a theory-driven historical case study to describe the influence of path-dependent administrative, fiscal and political decentralization processes on development of the district health system and district manager decision-space. Methods included a non-exhaustive ...