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Working Paper
Public savings in Africa: Do sovereign wealth funds serve development?Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa’s development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives...
Saving Sovereign wealth funds Fiscal policyBlog
Inequality, fiscal space, and crisis response — A matter of priority, affordability, or both?
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments financed more than 5000 fiscal support policies worldwide in 2020–21...
Fiscal policy Fiscal capacity InequalityBlog
Sales recovered faster from the pandemic than employment: Evidence from tax administrative and survey data in ZambiaLike most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity...
Competitiveness Debt FinanceWorking Paper
Microsimulation approaches to studying shocks and social protection in selected developing economiesThis paper calculates automatic stabilization in Ghana, South Africa, and Ecuador to explain income cushioning amid income and demand shocks. Fiscal policies within these countries are also stress tested to gauge welfare contingencies and insurance...
Developing countries Shocks Social protectionWorking Paper
Fiscal policy in times of fiscal stress: Or what to do when r > gSouth Africa runs a primary fiscal deficit and the long-term interest rate on government borrowing, r , is greater than the long-term economic growth rate, g . Without intervention, debt will continue to rise until there is a disorderly fiscal stop...
Fiscal sustainability Fiscal consolidation Policy coordinationReport
SOUTHMOD country report Mozambique - MOZMOD v2.9This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs...
Fiscal policy Revenues TaxationWorking Paper
The dynamics of domestic revenue mobilization across four decadesWe utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from 1...
Domestic revenue mobilization GRD TaxWorking Paper
The macroeconomic effect of fiscal policy in South Africa: A narrative analysisThis paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period...
Personal income tax Structural VAR Instrumental variableWorking Paper
Debt-financed fiscal stimulus in South AfricaDebt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the privat...
Public debt Interest rate Fiscal sustainabilityReport
SOUTHMOD country report Mozambique - MOZMOD v2.6aView the latest MOZMOD country report here . This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique...
Fiscal policy Revenues TaxationWorking Paper
Do fiscal regimes matter for fiscal sustainability in South Africa?: A Markov-switching approachThis paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019...
Fiscal sustainability Markov switching South AfricaWorking Paper
From fiscal stabilization to economic diversification: A developmental approach to managing resource revenuesThe management of revenues from exhaustible natural resources involves a number of challenges...
Commodity dependence Economic development Natural resourcesPolicy Brief
Fiscal multipliers and debt dynamics using a DSGE approachMuch of the research on the impact of fiscal policy shocks on macroeconomic outcomes (e.g., fiscal multipliers) uses reduced-form modelling approaches such as vector auto-regressions to obtain empirical results...
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model Fiscal multipliers Fiscal policyPolicy Brief
Policy implications of empirically estimated fiscal multipliers for South AfricaDespite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic outcomes. This impact is quantified by calculating fiscal multipliers...
Fiscal multipliers Fiscal policy State-dependentWorking Paper
A medium-sized, open-economy, fiscal DSGE model of South AfricaMuch of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches...
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model Fiscal policy Fiscal multipliersWorking Paper
Empirical estimates of fiscal multipliers for South AfricaDespite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e...
Fiscal multipliers Fiscal policy State-dependent