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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.
South Sudan is a very fragile post-conflict country. After five years of civil conflict, the warring parties came to an agreement for power-sharing in September 2018 and formed a unity government in February 2020. However, peace remains fragile in the face of difficult humanitarian and economic conditions. Already very high levels of poverty and food insecurity have been exacerbated by severe flooding in recent months. The floods (the worst in 60 years) have killed livestock, destroyed food stocks, and damaged crops ahead of the main harvest season. South Sudan’s economy has been hit hard by lower international oil prices following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The sharp increase in fiscal deficits and public debt in most advanced and several developing economies has raised concerns about the sustainability of public finances and highlighted the need for a significant adjustment over the medium term. This paper assesses the usefulness of fiscal rules in supporting fiscal consolidation, discusses the design and implementation of rules based on a new data base spanning the whole Fund membership, and explores the fiscal framework that could be adopted as countries emerge from the crisis.
This paper examines the fiscal responses of oil-producing countries (OPCs) to the oil boom through 2005 and the role of special fiscal institutions (SFIs)—oil funds, fiscal rules and fiscal responsibility legislation (FRL), and budgetary oil prices—in fiscal management in OPCs, and draws some general lessons.
Strengthening fiscal frameworks, in particular fiscal rules, has emerged as a key response to the fiscal legacy of the crisis. This paper takes stock of fiscal rules in use around the world, compiles a dataset - covering national and supranational fiscal rules, in 81 countries from 1985 to end-March 2012 - and presents details about the rules’ key design elements, particularly in support of enforcement. This information is summarized in a set of fiscal rules indices. Three key findings emerge: (i) many new fiscal rules have been adopted and existing ones strengthened in response to the crisis; (ii) the number of fiscal rules and the comprehensiveness of the design features in emerging economies has caught up to those in advanced economies; and (iii) the "next-generation" fiscal rules are increasingly complex as they combine the objectives of sustainability and with the need for flexibility in response to shocks, thereby creating new challenges for implementation, communication, and monitoring.
This project, based on the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) data set, researched how PEFA can be used to shape policy development in public financial management (PFM) and other major relevant policy areas such as anticorruption, revenue mobilization, political economy analysis, and fragile states. The report explores what shapes the PFM system in low- and middle-income countries by examining the relationship between political institutions and the quality of the PFM system. Although the report finds some evidence that multiple political parties in control of the legislature is associated with better PFM performance, the report finds the need to further refine and test th...