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Fiscal Rules
Over the past decade, Lesotho and Swaziland have faced significant volatility in their fiscal revenues, owing to highly unstable Southern African Customs Union (SACU) receipts. Based on model analysis, this paper explores the advantages of implementing fiscal rules to deal with such volatility. It finds that the use of a structural balance target could smooth the growth impact from revenue shocks while helping preserve sufficient international reserves during bad times. From a long-term perspective, it suggests possible welfare gains from introducing fiscal rules. Last, it concludes that, based on experiences in other countries, developing strong institutions and improving public financial management are necessary steps to ease the transitions to a rules-based fiscal policy framework.
Estimation of Drivers of Public Education Expenditure
This paper analyzes drivers of rising per-pupil public education spending, including Baumol’s “cost disease” effect. Higher wages paid to teachers contributed significantly to the increase in per-pupil spending over the past decades. Empirical analyses using a large dataset of advanced and developing economies show that the contribution of Baumol’s effect was much smaller than impled by theory. Rather, the spending inccrease reflects rising wage premiums paid for teachers in excess of market wages, especially in middle-income countries. The strong wage premium effect suggests that institutional characteristics that govern teachers’ wage setting are key determinants of education expenditure.
Firm-Level Digitalization and Resilience to Shocks: Role of Fiscal Policy
Firm-level Digitalization and Resilience to Shocks: Role of Fiscal Policy
Enforcing Public-Private Partnership Contract: How do Fiscal Institutions Matter?
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have increased rapidly in emerging and developing countries, creating both opportunities and fiscal challenges. One of the main challenges is that while governments have increased commitments in guarantees and direct subsidies to promote PPPs, contractual disputes remain high with significant costs. This paper examines how fiscal institutions affect the selection of PPP contracts and the probability of contract disputes using about 6,000 PPP contract-level data. The analysis shows that larger government financing needs, lower budget transparency and bureaucratic efficiency are associated with higher probability for governments to offer guarantees. Propensity score matching results show that disputes are more common for guaranteed contracts due to adverse selection and contingent liability effects. PPP management quality and budget transparency are found to be key determinants for a longer survival of PPPs.
Transforming Public Finance Through GovTech
Digital divide across countries and within countries continues to persist and even increased when the quality of internet connection is considered. The note shows that many governments have not been able to harness the full potential of digitalization. Governments could play important role to facilitate digital adoption by intervening both on supply (investing in infrastructure) and demand side (increase internet affordability). The note also documents significant dividends from digital adoption for revenue collection and spending efficiency, and for outcomes in education, health and social safety nets. The note also emphasizes that digitalization is not a substitute for good governance and that comprehensive reform plans embedded in National Digital Strategies (NDS) combined with legal and institutional reforms are needed to ensure that governments can reap full benefits from digitalization and manage the risks appropriately.
Road to Industrialized Africa: Role of Efficient Factor Market in Firm Growth
After a decade of rapid growth, industrialization has lost ground with shrinking manufacturing sector and high informality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper explores how land market and labor regulations affect factor allocative efficiency and firm performance in SSA. Using pooled data on firm balance sheets for 40 countries in SSA, the results identify significant land and labor misallocations due to limited market allocation of land and inappropriate regulatory policies. Using variations in ethnic diversity and the intensity of regulatory actions to peer firms at subnational level as instrumental variables, local average treatment effects show large productivity gains from factor reallocations, especially for marginally productive firms. Panel data results for Nigerian firms confirm factor market inefficiency as a principal driver of declining productivity, while showing that the 2011 minimum wage reform increased firm size. The results imply that improving formal regulation is critical to support firm growth at the stage of weak legal capacity, while informal sector monitoring gets effective as legal capacity develops.
Inclusive GovTech: Enhancing Efficiency and Equity Through Public Service Digitalization
How could the GovTech improve budget processes and execution efficiency? Could the GovTech strengthen redistributive function of public expenditure? Based on an event-study method, this paper finds that the introduction of digital budget payments and e-procurement could significantly enhance budget transparency and help expand the coverage of social assistance to reach the most vulnerable population. Exploiting staggered adoption of digital budget payments, a synthetic control regression identifies meaningful increase in pre-tax income shares among the bottom 50th percentile and female workers, especially for emerging market and developing countries, with effects materializing gradually over...
Exploring the Adoption of Selected Digital Technologies in Tax Administration
Using cross-country data, this note explores the potential impact of selected digital technologies on tax collection and compliance. The analysis makes use of multi-dimensional International Survey on Revenue Administration, Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool, and Revenue Administration-Gap Analysis Program (RA-GAP) data with results indicating that digital technologies could help enhance tax collection, but with effects that vary by the type of specific digital service or tools introduced. While the results demonstrate a strong association between digital tax administration operations and improved performance outcomes, the realization of revenue gains is heavily contingent on acc...
Quantifying the Revenue Yields from Tax Administration Reforms
Despite the criticality of tax administration (TA) reforms in enhancing domestic revenue mobilization, few studies have attempted to quantify the revenue impact of such reforms. This paper fills this gap by estimating the revenue yields associated with various tax administration capabilities, based on the International Survey on Tax Administration (ISORA), the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool (TADAT), and TA reform episodes datasets (identified by Akitoby et al., 2020). It uses a Hausman-Taylor cross-country panel regression and an event study for specific TA reform episodes. Our results (using the ISORA data) show that an increase in the overall strength of TA from the 40th per...
