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Fiscal Risk Sharing in China: Is It Significant and How to Further Improve It?
The COVID-19 pandemic has weakened the fiscal positions of local governments in China, while the recent stress in the Chinese property market has further compounded this issue, calling for stronger fiscal risk sharing among provinces. This paper examines the existing central to local governmental transfer system and its effect on interprovincial risk sharing and redistribution in China. We show that the fiscal transfers have played an important role in risk sharing although their main purpose is still redistribution. We also propose an alternative transfer mechanism with the size of transfers to each province linked to the shocks that the province is facing to enhance the fiscal risk-sharing effect. Using counterfactual simulations, we show that such an alternative mechanism can significantly enhance risk sharing among all provinces against idiosyncratic shocks while maintaining a comparable level of redistribution effect. Intergovernmental reforms and other structural measures could also be considered to further improve policy efficiency and effectiveness.
Investing in Public Infrastructure
Why do governments in developing economies invest in roads and not enough in schools? In the presence of distortionary taxation and debt aversion, the different pace at which roads and schools contribute to economic growth turns out to be central to this decision. Specifically, while costs are front-loaded for both types of investment, the growth benefits of schools accrue with a delay. To put things in perspective, with a “big push,” even assuming a large (15 percent) return differential in favor of schools, the government would still limit the fraction of the investment scale-up going to schools to about a half. Besides debt aversion, political myopia also turns out to be a crucial determinant of public investment composition. A “big push,” by accelerating growth outcomes, mitigates myopia—but at the expense of greater risks to fiscal and debt sustainability. Tied concessional financing and grants can potentially mitigate the adverse effects of both debt aversion and political myopia.
Macro-Structural Policies and Income Inequality in Low-Income Developing Countries
Despite sustained economic growth and rapid poverty reductions, income inequality remains stubbornly high in many low-income developing countries. This pattern is a concern as high levels of inequality can impair the sustainability of growth and macroeconomic stability, thereby also limiting countries’ ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. This underscores the importance of understanding how policies aimed at boosting economic growth affect income inequality. Using empirical and modeling techniques, the note confirms that macro-structural policies aimed at raising growth payoffs in low-income developing countries can have important distributional consequences, with the impact dependent on both the design of reforms and on country-specific economic characteristics. While there is no one-size-fits-all recipe, the note explores how governments can address adverse distributional consequences of reforms by designing reform packages to make pro-growth policies also more inclusive.
Climate Change Mitigation and Policy Spillovers in the EU’s Immediate Neighborhood
EU’s neighborhood countries (EUN) have lagged the EU on emissions mitigation; coal-heavy power generation and industrial sectors are a key factor. They have also trailed EU countries in emissions mitigation policies since 2000, with little use of market-based instruments, and they still have substantial fossil fuel subsidies. Increasingly stringent EU mitigation policies are asociated with lower emissions in EUN. Overall output effects of the CBAM, in its current form, would be limited, though exports and emissions-intensive industries could be heavily impacted. A unilaterally adopted economywide carbon tax of $75 per ton would significantly lower emissions by 2030, with minimal consequences for output or household welfare, though a safety net for the affected workers may be necessary. To become competitive today by attracting green FDI and technology, overcoming infrastructure constraints and integrating into EU’s supply chains, EUN countries would be well served to front load decarbonization, rather than postpone it for later.
Macroeconomic Dimensions of Public-Private Partnerships
The voluminous literature comparing public-private partnerships (P3s) and own-investment (OI) by the public sector is dominated by contributions from microeconomic theory. This paper gives macroeconomics a voice in the debate by investigating the repercussions of P3 vs. OI in a dynamic general equilibrium model featuring private capital accumulation and involuntary unemployment with efficiency wages. Typically P3s cost more but produce higher-quality infrastructure and boast a better on-time completion record than OI; consequently, they are comparatively more effective in reducing underinvestment in private capital, underinvestment in infrastructure, unemployment and poverty. The asymmetric impact on macro externalities raises the social return in the P3 2 - 9 percentage points relative to the social return to OI, depending on whether the externalities operate singly or in combination and on whether P3 enjoys an advantage in speed of construction.
Public Investment in Resource-Abundant Developing Countries
Natural resource revenues provide a valuable source to finance public investment in developing countries, which frequently face borrowing constraints and tax revenue mobilization problems. This paper develops a dynamic stochastic small open economy model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of investing natural resource revenues, making explicit the role of pervasive features in these countries including public investment inefficiency, absorptive capacity constraints, Dutch disease, and financing needs to sustain capital. Revenue exhaustibility raises medium-term issues of how to sustain capital built during a windfall, while revenue volatility raises short-term concerns about macroeconomic instability. Using the model, country applications show how combining public investment with a resource fund---a sustainable investing approach---can help address the macroeconomic problems associated with both exhaustibility and volatility. The applications also demonstrate how the model can be used to determine the appropriate magnitude of the investment scaling-up (accounting for the financing needs to sustain capital) and the adequate size of a stabilization fund (buffer).
Is South Asia Ready for Take Off?
Since the mid-1980s, durable reforms coupled with prudent macroeconomic management have brought steady progress to the South Asia region, making it one of the world’s fastest growing regions. Real GDP growth has steadily increased from an average of about 3 percent in the 1970s to 7 percent over the last decade. Although growth trajectories varied across countries, reforms supported strong per capita income growth in the region, lifting over 200 million people out of poverty in the last three decades. Today, South Asia accounts for one-fifth of the world’s population and, thanks to India’s increasing performance, contributes to over 15 percent of global growth. Looking ahead, the autho...
Investing Volatile Oil Revenues in Capital-Scarce Economies
Natural resource revenues are an increasingly important financing source for public investment in many developing economies. Investing volatile resource revenues, however, may subject an economy to macroeconomic instability. This paper applies to Angola the fiscal framework developed in Berg et al. (forthcoming) that incorporates investment inefficiency and absorptive capacity constraints, often encountered in developing countries. The sustainable investing approach, which combines a stable fiscal regime with external savings, can convert resource wealth to development gains while maintaining economic stability. Stochastic simulations demonstrate how the framework can be used to inform allocations between capital spending and external savings when facing uncertain oil revenues. An overly aggressive investment scaling-up path could result in insufficient fiscal buffers when faced with negative oil price shocks. Consequently, investment progress can be interrupted, driving up the capital depreciation rate, undermining economic stability, and lowering the growth benefits of public investment.
Well Spent
Drawing on the Fund’s analytical and capacity development work, including Public Investment Management Assessments (PIMAs) carried out in more than 60 countries, the new book Well Spent: How Strong Infrastructure Governance Can End Waste in Public Investment will address how countries can attain quality infrastructure outcomes through better infrastructure governance—an issue becoming increasingly important in the context of the Great Lockdown and its economic consequences. It covers critical issues such as infrastructure investment and Sustainable Development Goals, controlling corruption, managing fiscal risks, integrating planning and budgeting, and identifying best practices in project appraisal and selection. It also covers emerging areas in infrastructure governance, such as maintaining and managing public infrastructure assets and building resilience against climate change.
Ecuador
This Selected Issues paper presents an assessment of macro-financial stability in Ecuador. Ecuador is being hit by external shocks that imply a downward adjustment in growth and financial intermediation. The financial system has been liquid and well-capitalized through 2014, but recently pressures on liquidity positions as well as credit and interest risks have been on the rise. Although main financial stability indicators do not show signs of stress in the first half of 2015, the developments warrant close monitoring and rapid reactions if pressures continue.
