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Mali’s wage bill has soared to levels not seen since the early 1990s. This may cause considerable opportunity costs—limiting fiscal space and potentially adding to inflationary pressures—as well as adversely affect medium-term debt sustainability as it weighs heavily on the primary deficit. This SIP investigates the extent and drivers of the recent wage increases and their fiscal and economic consequences. It concludes that across-the board salary freezes may help wage growth moderation in the short term but are politically difficult to implement. Structural reforms to strengthen wage bill management are critical to preserving medium-term fiscal sustainability.

Aggregate Human Capital --- Aggregate Labor Productivity --- Civil service & public sector --- Civil service --- Employment --- Expenditure --- Government wage bill --- Income economics --- Incomes Policy --- Intergenerational Income Distribution --- International agencies --- International Agreements and Observance --- International Economics --- International institutions --- International organization --- International Organizations --- Labor --- Labour --- Monetary economics --- Monetary Policy --- Monetary policy --- Money and Monetary Policy --- National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: General --- Personnel Economics: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects --- Price Policy --- Public finance & taxation --- Public Finance --- Public sector wages --- Unemployment --- Wage adjustments --- Wages --- Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General --- Mali

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This paper reviews the experience of the Middle East and North Africa region in education attainment over the past four decades (1970-2010). It documents the following main findings: (a) all countries in the region experienced significant improvements in educational attainment over this period; (b) most countries in the region did better in this regard than comparators that had roughly the same education stocks in 1970; (c) collectively, the region achieved a greater percentage increase in education than other regions; (d) the region's better performance was in part because of higher rates of public spending on education, better food sufficiency status, and a lower initial stock of education in 1970 in comparison with most other developing country regions; and (e) the region had among the lowest payoffs to public spending in terms of increments in education stock; the impressive advance in education was achieved at high cost.

Access & Equity in Basic Education --- Disability --- Economic Development --- Education --- Education For All --- Food Adequacy --- Middle East --- Primary Education --- Public Spending --- Social Protections and Labor --- Teaching and Learning

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Progress in child mortality reduction and education attainment varies widely among oil-rich countries. This paper investigates the causes of this variation using an empirical model that departs from the available literature in allowing for explicit measurement of the impact of initial levels of child mortality and education attainment. The results show that the following four variables are statistically significant and robust across various specifications: public spending on health and education, economic growth rates, caloric sufficiency, and initial levels of child mortality and education attainment. Further analysis was conducted to determine the economic significance of these factors by examining the contribution of each to the fitted growth rates (as a deviation from the sample mean) of child mortality and secondary school enrollment for 14 oil-rich developing countries. The analysis reveals some interesting patterns. First, initial conditions dominate the results for education attainment: the initial level of secondary school enrollment in 1980 is the dominant factor in explaining subsequent improvements in 10 of the 14 oil-rich developing countries for which calculations could be performed. Second, policy factors worked in different ways in different countries. A high degree of caloric sufficiency enabled countries in the Middle East and North Africa to reduce child mortality faster, while low levels of caloric sufficiency prevented African oil-rich countries, such as Angola and the Republic of Congo, from making progress. Third, levels of public spending were not economically critical for gains in school enrollment, although they were important in a few country cases for improvements in child mortality rates.

Child Mortality --- Public Spending --- School Enrollment

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This paper provides a novel dataset of time-varying measures on the degree of countercyclicality of fiscal policies for advanced and developing economies between 1980 and 2021. The use of time-varying measures of fiscal stabilization, with special attention to potential endogenity issues, overcomes the major limitation of previous studies and alllows the analysis to account for both country-specific as well as global factors. The paper also examines the key determinants of countercyclicality of fiscal policy with a focus on factors as severe crises, informality, financial development, and governance. Empirical results show that (i) fiscal policy tends to be more counter-cyclical during severe crises than typical recessions, especially for advanced economies; (ii) fiscal counter-cyclicality has increased over time for many economies over the last two decades; (iii) discretionary and automatic countercyclicality are both strong in advanced economies but acyclical (at times procyclical) in low-income countries, (iv) fiscal countercyclicality operates primarily through the expenditure channel, particularly for social benefits, (vi) better financial development, larger government size and stronger institutional quality are associated with larger countercyclical effects of fiscal policy. Our results are robust to various specifications and endogeneity checks.

Automatic stabilizers --- Business Fluctuations --- Comparative or Joint Analysis of Fiscal and Monetary Policy --- Currency crises --- Cycles --- Economic & financial crises & disasters --- Economics of specific sectors --- Economics --- Economics: General --- Emerging and frontier financial markets --- Expenditure --- Expenditures, Public --- Finance --- Finance: General --- Financial markets --- Financial services industry --- Fiscal Policy --- Fiscal policy --- Fiscal stabilization --- General Financial Markets: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Informal sector --- Macroeconomics --- National Deficit Surplus --- National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: General --- Public finance & taxation --- Public Finance --- Stabilization --- Treasury Policy