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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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Zonder onderwerpscode: wereldeconomie, ontwikkelingsproblematiek

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Zonder onderwerpscode: wereldeconomie, ontwikkelingsproblematiek

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The paper estimates the rates of return to investment in education in Egypt, allowing for multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals. The paper finds that, in the period 1998-2006, returns to education increased for workers with higher education, but fell for workers with intermediate education levels; the relative wage of illiterate workers also fell in the period. This change can be explained by supply and demand factors. On the supply side, the number workers with intermediate education, as well as illiterate ones, outpaced the growth of other categories joining the labor force during the decade. From the labor demand side, the Egyptian economy experienced a structural transformation by which sectors demanding higher-skilled labor, such as financial intermediation and communications, gained importance to the detriment of agriculture and construction, which demand lower-skilled workers. In Egypt, individuals are sorted into different educational tracks, creating the first source of heterogeneity: those that are sorted into the general secondary-university track have higher returns than those sorted into vocational training. Second, the paper finds that large-firm workers earn higher returns than small-firm workers. Third, females have larger returns to education. Female government workers earn similar wages as private sector female workers, while male workers in the private sector earn a premium of about 20 percent on average. This could lead to higher female reservation wages, which could explain why female unemployment rates are significantly higher than male unemployment rates. Formal workers earn higher rates of return to education than those in the informal sector, which did not happen a decade earlier. And finally, those individuals with access to technology (as proxied by personal computer ownership) have higher returns.

Access & Equity in Basic Education --- Access To Technology --- Education --- Education for All --- Firm Size --- Formality --- Gender --- Labor Markets --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Poverty Reduction --- Primary Education --- Returns To Education --- Teaching and Learning --- Egypt