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This authoritative book explains the sources and scale of current economic challenges and proposes solutions to craft a brighter future by building a sustainable, green, and inclusive society in the years ahead.
Edited by Nora Lustig, the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty (Brookings Institution Press and CEQ Institute-Tulane University, 2nd edition, 2022) is a unique manual on the theory and practical methods to estimate the impact of taxation and public spending on inequality and poverty. In addition, the second edition covers frontier topics such as alternative approaches to measure the redistributive effect of education, health, and infrastructure spending. Policymakers, social planners, and economists are provided with a step-by-step guide to applying fiscal incidence analysis, illustrated by country studies. The 2nd edition of the Ha...
This Selected Issues paper analyzes remittances and households’ behavior in Guatemala. Remittances are a structural feature of the Guatemala economy. In 2017, remittance flows accounted for over 11 percent of GDP and benefitted over 1.5 million of Guatemalan households. The effects of remittances on the labor supply are estimated. There is no evidence of remittance-induced work disincentives. The results suggest that the labor supply for members of remittance-receiving households is relatively more elastic, most markedly so for the 41-65 age group: a one percent increase in weekly wages leads to a 0.5 percent increase in weekly hours worked for members of remittance-receiving households, versus 0.2 percent increase for non-remittance-receiving households.
In this issue, a team of economists look at approaches to modeling the use of IMF resources in order to gauge whether the recent decline in credit outstanding is a temporary or permanent phenomenon. Era Dabla-Norris and Gabriela Inchauste examine what drives the growth of firms, with a focus on informality and regulations. Evan Tanner and Issouf Samake use a vector autoregression approach to examine the probabilistic sustainability of public debt in Brazil. Mexico, and Turkey. And Rachel Glennerster and Yongseok Shin ask whether transparency pays?that is, does the frequency and accuracy of macroeconomic information released to the public lead to lower borrowing costs in sovereign debt markets?
The World Bank has partnered with the Commitment to Equity Institute at Tulane University to implement their diagnostic tool—the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Assessment—designed to assess how taxation and public expenditures affect income inequality, poverty, and different economic groups. The approach relies on comprehensive fiscal incidence analysis, which measures the contribution of each individual intervention to poverty and inequality reduction as well as the combined impact of taxes and social spending. The CEQ Assessment provide an evidence base upon which alternative reform options can be analyzed. The use of a common methodology makes the results comparable across countries. This volume presents eight country studies that examine the distributional effects of individual programs and policy measures—and the net effect of each country’s mix of policies and programs. These case studies were produced in the context of Bank policy dialogue and have since been used to propose alternative reform options.
The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems—the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state. The Welfare State Revisited takes on major debates about social well-being, considering the merits of universal versus targeted policies; responses to market failures; integrating welfare and economic development; and how welfare states a...
This book presents 15 original papers and commentaries by a distinguished group of tax policy and tax administration experts. Using international examples, they highlight the state of knowledge of tax reform, present new thinking about the issue, and analyze useful policy options. The book’s general goal is to examine the current and emerging challenges facing tax reformers and to assess possible directions future reforms are likely to take. More specific themes include distributional issues, how to tax capital income, how to design specific taxes (e.g., the income tax, the value-added tax, the property tax), how to consider the politics and administrative aspects of tax reform, and how to combine the separate insights into comprehensive tax reform.
This paper highlights that despite unprecedented gains in living standards in some countries over the past few decades, poverty continues as a harsh reality in too much of the developing world. The causes lie in part with poor country governments that have not followed through on the policies and programs needed to accelerate growth and eradicate poverty. But they also reflect the uneven record of development assistance and protectionist trade policies and agricultural subsidies in industrial countries, which have dampened profitable investment and growth in the developing world.
In contrast to advanced markets (AMs), procyclical monetary policy has been a problem for emerging markets (EMs), with macroeconomic policies amplifying economic upswings and deepening downturns. The stark difference in policy has not been subject to extensive study and this paper attempts to address the gap. Key findings, using a large sample of EMs over the past 50 years, are: (i) EMs have adopted increasingly countercyclical monetary policy over time, although large differences remain among EMs and policies became more procyclical during the recent crisis. (ii) Inflation targeting and better institutions have been key factors behind the move to countercyclicality. (iii) Only deep financial markets allow EMs with flexible exchange rate regimes turn countercyclical. (iv) More countercyclical policy is associated with far less volatile output. The economically meaningful impact of IT on monetary policy countercyclicality and output variability is another reason in its favor, over and above better inflation outcomes.
Despite increasing exchange rate flexibility, central banks in emerging markets still intervene in their foreign exchange markets for several reasons. In doing so, they face many operational questions, including on the degree of transparency and the choice of markets and counterparties. This paper identifies elements of best practice in official foreign exchange intervention, presents survey evidence on intervention practices in developing countries, and assesses the effectiveness of intervention in Mexico and Turkey.