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Fiscal Sustainability and Policy Issues in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union
The fiscal position of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) has deteriorated significantly in recent years, resulting in sharp increases in public debt. The sustainability of public debt is examined using the public sector budget constraint to derive the maximum public-debt-to-GDP ratio that can be sustained based on a country's projected steady-state primary balance, interest rate on public debt, and economic growth rate. In this context, government deficits and debt in several ECCU member countries appear unsustainable, posing a risk to the stability of the currency union. A critical issue facing member countries is to implement fiscal policies consistent with sustainable public finances and debt to underpin the currency union.
Improving Cross-Sector Data Consistency
The objective of the paper is to inform Executive Directors of recent work undertaken by the Statistics Department (STA) to further enhance data consistency. STA works to promote high quality statistics as essential pre-requisites for the formulation of appropriate macroeconomic and financial policies. Such work supports IMF surveillance and goals that are articulated in Board papers pertaining to Data Provision to the Fund for Surveillance Purposes; the G-20/IMFC Data Gaps Initiative; and the Fund’s Data Standards Initiatives. All these initiatives are motivated by the Executive Directors’ interest in better and more consistent data. An important element of STA’s work program is the p...
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
This 2001 Article IV Consultation highlights that in recent years, economy of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has diversified from bananas into services, mainly tourism, telephone and Internet-based marketing, and offshore financial services. However, the rate of economic growth declined sharply to 2 percent in 2000. The external current account deficit is estimated to have doubled to about 161⁄2 percent of GDP in 2001 largely owing to a decline in banana export volumes, higher imports, and a slowdown in tourism receipts and remittances.
The Universal Republic
Can humanity achieve collective self-government in a highly interdependent world? Catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, war and displacement, the dangers of nuclear weapons and new technologies, and persistent poverty and inequality are among the global challenges that expose the weaknesses of existing international institutions as well as the profound disparities of power and vulnerability that exist among the world's people. The Universal Republic: A Realistic Utopia? examines whether a democratic world state is a feasible and desirable solution to the problem of establishing effective and just governance on the planet we share. While this question has haunted thinkers...
Community, Scale, and Regional Governance
This is the second of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by the functional pressures that arise from the logic of scale in providing public goods and by the preferences that people have regarding self-government. The first has to do with the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. The second has to do with how people conceive and construct the groups to which they feel themselves be...
Recent Improvements to the Government Finance Statistics Yearbook Database in Response to Analytical Needs
The demand for high quality detailed public finance statistics covering a globally representative sample of countries has increased dramatically during the recent financial crisis. Due to the complexity of public finance statistics, however, such data tend to be either available in oversimplified high level aggregates and lacking in methodological transparency, or, available with a great level of detail and a unified methodological approach yet overly complicated to understand. The IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) withdata over an almost 40 year period for almost 140 countries is a valuable database but with a complex structure requiring some specialty knowledge that most data users do not have. The IMF's Statistics Department embarked on several initiatives to improve its accessibility. The purpose of this paper is to provide a non-technical overview of the methodology and advantages of the GFSY database and discussion of how the database is improving to better meet the needs of the user community.
The IMF's Government Finance Statistics Yearbook
A useful but little known feature of the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY) is the information on the structure of governments. Institutional tables, included in the GFSY, provide detail on the central, state, and local levels of governments, social security, and extrabudgetary units. We refer to the main levels of government as GL1, GL2, and GL3 in ascending order of institutional coverage. We present maps of the various levels of government for 74 countries to illustrate the usefulness of this database and make it more accessible to users. The maps provide information about how centralized or decentralized government finances and employment are and their size relative to the overall economy. Government map data facilitate the monitoring of fiscal policy and fiscal rules.
Measuring Fiscal Decentralization
Conventional wisdom postulates that there are benefits from decentralizing government finances but there is little empirical evidence about actual country practices. This paper presents data on fiscal decentralization for about 80 countries over a period of about 20 years (1990-2008) from the IMF’s Government Finance Statistics Yearbook (GFSY), the only global database with fiscal data for several levels of government. The data show that in many countries, revenue collection remains relatively more centralized than expenditures and that employment tends to be concentrated in lower levels of government. Except for transition economies, the levels of decentralization are relatively stable over the time period. The findings are shown by degree of economic development, constitutional power arrangements, and geographic area, broadly confirming key factors identified in the literature as determining the extent of fiscal decentralization.
Subnational Hydropolitics
It's often claimed that future wars will be fought over water. But while international water conflict is rare, it's common between subnational jurisdictions like states and provinces. Drawing on cases in the United States, China, India, and France, this book explains why these subnational water conflicts occur - and how they can be prevented.
Framing History in East-Central Europe and Beyond
During the 1970s todays Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, BMBWF) supported the founding of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Austrian Chair at Stanford University in California. These foundings were the initial incentives for the worldwide `spreading' of similar institutions; currently, nine Centers for Austrian and Central European Studies exist in seven countries on three continents. The funding of the Ministry enables to connect senior scholars with young scholars, to help young PhD students, to participate in and to benefit from the scientific connection of experienced researchers, and to get in touch with the national scientific community by `sniffing scientific air', as the Austrians like to say. Furthermore, it aims to avoid prejudices, and to spread a better understanding and knowledge about Austria and Central Europe by promoting scientific exchange.
