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This paper introduces a new index that captures the institutional environment underpinning public investment management across four different stages: project appraisal, selection, implementation, and evaluation. Covering 71 countries, including 40 low-income countries, the index allows for benchmarking across regions and country groups and for nuanced policy-relevant analysis and identification of specific areas where reform efforts could be prioritized. Potential research venues are outlined.
The effects of fiscal policy measures, both taxes and public spending, adopted by developing countries in response to the 2009 global crisis are still uncertain. This book discusses them using an analytical framework that allows for distilling possible implications on growth and social welfare.
Laying a solid foundation of economic facts and ideas, this book provides a comprehensive look at the critical role of public capital in development.
This Selected Issues paper on Senegal revisits the challenges of emergence by tapping on the experience of other countries across the world that became emerging economies in the past two decades. It then looks at the preconditions needed for growth acceleration in Senegal. The paper also discusses options for strengthening Senegal’s fiscal framework to support Plan Sénégal Emergent (PSE) implementation while keeping risks of debt distress low. It provides an assessment of Senegal’s external stability and explores how to improve the structure of the Senegalese economy to make it more competitive with more diversified exports. The paper describes the electricity problem as a major impediment to growth acceleration. Improved revenue performance and expenditure composition are critical for creating the fiscal space to support the PSE. There is an opportunity cost for development spending, as the economy still faces bottlenecks from high electricity costs and insufficient electricity production. The share of the population living below the poverty line and its exposure to shock remains unacceptably high.
Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.
Welfare economics, scope and performance of government, externalities, public goods, cost-benefit analysis, subsidies economize on spending without losing effectiveness by modifying the conceptual framework guiding state expenditures. The familiar framework says that state intervention is justified when the spending provides public goods or when the intervention addresses externalities, provided the social return is above a threshold. This paper argues that another consideration needs to be brought into the mix - whether, in spite of the externalities, the private sector has an incentive to undertake the activity. It is argued that these two considerations together define a more efficient fr...
This Selected Issues paper quantifies the short- and medium-term growth effects of major ongoing highway and railway projects in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. A standard neoclassical growth model is augmented with public capital to capture both demand and supply-side effects of public infrastructure investments. The calibrated model suggests that the four ongoing highway and railway investments of 2–3 percent of GDP annually for 2014–18 are likely to raise the growth rate of real GDP by 0.5 percentage points on average for each year in 2014–20. Enhancing public investment efficiency can increase growth effects up to 0.8 percentage points.
This paper aims to widen the prism through which Fund policy analysis is conducted for resource-rich developing countries (RRDCs). While all resource-rich economies face resource revenue exhaustibility and volatility, RRDCs face additional challenges, including lack of access to international capital markets and domestic capital scarcity. Resource exhaustibility gives rise to inter-temporal decisions of how much of the resource wealth to consume and how much to save, and revenue volatility calls for appropriate fiscal rules and precautionary savings. Under certain conditions, it would be optimal for a significant share of a RRDC’s savings to be in domestic real assets (e.g., investment in domestic infrastructure), though absorptive capacity constraints need to be tackled to promote efficient spending and short-run policies are needed to preserve macroeconomic stability. The objective of this paper is to develop new macro-fiscal frameworks and policy analysis tools for RRDCs that could enhance Fund policy advice.
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.
At a time when the development community is grappling with the challenge of raising the required investment—estimated in the trillions of dollars—for attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), countries’ mobilization of their own fiscal revenues is receiving increasing attention. This edited volume discusses the political and institutional contexts that enable poor countries to mobilize domestic resources for global commitments and national development priorities. It examines the processes and mechanisms that connect the politics of resource mobilization and demands for social provision; changes in state-citizen, state-business and donor-recipient relations associated with...