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Given that public spending will have a positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring costs and benefits of public spending. The paper discusses one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy debates, namely, the volatility derived from additional public spending. The paper identifies a relationship between public spending volatility and consumption volatility, which implies a direct welfare loss to society. This loss is substantial in developing countries, estimated at 8 percent of consumption. If welfare losses due to volatility are this sizeable, then measuring the benefits of public spending is critical. Gauging benefits based on macro aggregate data requires three caveats: a) considering of the impact of the funding (taxation) required for the additional public spending; b) differentiating between investment and capital formation; c) allowing for heterogeneous response of output to different types of capital and differences in network development. It is essential to go beyond country-specificity to project-level evaluation of the benefits and costs of public projects. From the micro viewpoint, the rate of return of a project must exceed the marginal cost of public funds, determined by tax levels and structure. Credible evaluations require microeconomic evidence and careful specification of counterfactuals. On this, the impact evaluation literature and methods play a critical role. From individual project evaluation, the analyst must contemplate the general equilibrium impacts. In general, the paper advocates for project evaluation as a central piece of any development platform. By increasing the efficiency of public spending, the government can permanently increase the rate of productivity growth and, hence, affect the growth rate of GDP.

Access to Finance --- Debt Markets --- Economic efficiency --- Economic Theory and Research --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public --- Public debt --- Public debt management --- Public Expenditure --- Public expenditure management --- Public funds --- Public Sector Economics and Finance --- Public Sector Expenditure Analysis and Management --- Public spending --- Tax --- Taxation

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Policy makers in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) often complain that poor fiscal performance in their countries is a result of a high degree of spending rigidity. Despite being a common complaint, the issue has remained largely ignored by the literature because of the lack of adequate measures of rigidity that allow cross-country and time series comparability. This report helps close this gap by introducing a new measure of spending rigidities that can be easily applied to multiple countries. It focuses on the categories of spending that are naturally inflexible--wages, pensions, transfers to subnational governments, and debt service--and separates them into two components: structural and nonstructural. The structural component is determined by economic, demographic, and institutional fundamentals. The nonstructural component is determined by short-run transitory factors associated with business and political cycles. The degree of rigidity of spending is then proxied by the ratio of structural spending to total spending, with a higher value indicating that spending is driven mostly by factors out of the policy makers' control. This concept of rigidity was applied to 120 countries for the years 2000-17 and produced several interesting results: --Advanced economies and developing countries in other regions have higher levels of rigidity than countries in LAC. --The sources of rigidity vary by country. --Higher rigidity is associated with higher spending levels, higher tax rates, higher public debt, and lower efficiency of public spending. --Rigidity has pervasive effects on fiscal sustainability, increasing the country's financing needs and reducing the probability of the country starting a fiscal adjustment. Given these pervasive effects of spending rigidity, the report concludes by discussing several policies to contain the sources of rigidity in the long term, ranging from the importance of deepening the pension reform process to the need of establishing strong fiscal institutions promoting medium-term fiscal planning.

Budgetary Process --- Fiscal Policy --- Political Economy --- Public Debt --- Public Employment --- Wage Bill

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Government spending in developing countries typically account for between 15 and 30 percent of GDP. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on GDP and on the attainment of the government ' s objectives. The first challenge that stakeholders face is measuring efficiency. This paper attempts such quantification and has two major parts. The first part estimates efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier (defined as the maximum attainable output for a given level of inputs). This frontier is estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Both input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 140 countries using data from 1996 to 2002. The second part of the paper seeks to verify empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency. Results show that countries with higher expenditure levels register lower efficiency scores, as well as countries where the wage bill is a larger share of the government ' s budget. Similarly, countries with higher ratios of public to private financing of the service provision score lower efficiency, as do countries plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and those with higher income inequality. Countries with higher aid-dependency ratios also tend to score lower in efficiency, probably due to the volatility of this type of funding that impedes medium term planning and budgeting. Though no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar educational and health outcomes.

Children --- Decision Making --- Diphtheria --- Environment --- Environmental Economics and Policies --- Health --- Health Care --- Health Care Professionals --- Health Indicators --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health Outcomes --- Health Services --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Hospitals --- Immunization --- Implementation --- International Comparisons --- Knowledge --- Life Expectancy --- Lifestyle --- Measurement --- Mortality --- Observation --- Patient

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"Despite significant progress in economic reform throughout the 1990s and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, Herrera identifies other sources of uncertainty emanating from the policymaking framework: fiscal policy was not responsive to the shocks, public debt instruments were used with several objectives (to stabilize the currency and to lengthen maturity) and there was inadequate supervision of agents holding public debt. Most of the flaws have been fixed following the crisis: * The primary fiscal balance has been increased, sending the signal that it is a flexible instrument that will be used to ensure commitment of the sovereign to honor its obligations. * The central bank formally transferred to the Treasury the remaining debt-issuance functions, facilitating a more adequate balancing of different risks involved in debt management. * Mutual funds' public debt holdings are better regulated, ensuring that end-investors have the proper information to assess the risk of the institutions in which they invest. This paper--a product of the Economic Policy Division, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network--is part of a larger effort in the network to disseminate country experiences in the design of policymaking frameworks that facilitate adjustment of the economy to external shocks"--World Bank web site.

Debts, Public --- Financial crises --- Fiscal policy

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The authors examine if observed asset prices in Latin America depart significantly from fundamentals-determined levels. These departures, or bubbles, are found to be equally determined by both country-specific and common external variables, contrary to previous studies that found that local factors were predominant in asset price determination in Latin America. Herrera and Perry test for the existence of asset price bubbles in Latin America in 1980-2001, focusing mainly on stock prices. Based on unit root and cointegration tests, they find that they cannot reject the hypothesis of bubbles. They arrive at the same conclusion using Froot and Obstfeld's intrinsic bubbles model. To examine empirical regularities of these bubble episodes in the region, the authors identify periods of significant stock price overvaluation. They quantify the relative importance of different factors that determine the probability of bubble occurrence, focusing on the contrast between the country-specific variables and the common external factors. They include as country-specific variables both the level and the volatility of domestic credit growth, the volatility of asset returns, the capital flows to each country, and the terms of trade. As common external variables, they consider the degree of asset overvaluation in the U.S. stock and real estate markets and the term spread of U.S. Treasury securities. To quantitatively assess the relative importance of each factor, they estimate a logit model for a panel of five Latin American countries from 1985 to 2001. In general, the authors find that the marginal probabilities of common and country-specific variables are of roughly the same order of magnitude. This finding contrasts with those of previous studies that real asset returns in Latin America are dominated by local factors. Finally, the authors explore the main channels through which asset prices affect real economic activity, with the most important being the balance sheet effect and its impact on bank lending. They show how the allocation of bank lending across different sectors responded sensitively to real estate prices during the boom years in countries that experienced banking crises. Thus asset price bubbles have long-lasting effects in the financial sector and, through this channel, on growth. Another channel through which asset prices-particularly stock market prices-affect long-run growth is through their effect on investment. The authors find a strong positive association between stock prices and investment and a negative effect of stock price volatility on investment. An additional motive for the central bank to monitor asset prices is the general coincidence of the crash episodes identified by the authors with currency crises in the region in the past two decades. This paper-a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region-is part of a larger effort to understand asset pricing in the region, and to examine the relationship between asset prices and other variables, such as domestic credit and capital flows. The authors may be contacted at sherrera@worldbank.org or gperry@worldbank.org.

Stocks --- Financial crises. --- Prices.