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83.52 public sector economics. --- Accountancy. --- Comptabiliteit. --- Economics. --- Openbaar bestuur. --- Public administration.

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Electronic reverse auctions are the most used competitive method for procurement of goods and non-consulting services by the Federal Government of Brazil. These auctions are closed randomly, which perfectly satisfies fairness considerations but may be suboptimal from an efficiency perspective. There are concerns that tenders are closed too early and randomness favors bidders with algorithmic bidding software, leading to high prices. Hence, this paper investigates what would happen if the random closing rule was replaced by another rule. The paper uses the complete data set of completed electronic actions in 2015-17 comprising 112 million bids for 0.9 million items purchased. Exploiting the random closing rule, simple OLS models are run with a wide set of fixed effects as well as covariates capturing competition. The findings point at alternative strategies to optimize auction design: simple actions such as increasing the average and minimum length of the random phase can result in 2.8 and 0.6 percent price savings, respectively, or RD 540 million and RD 116 million per year; or more complex designs such as setting the length to the maximum for the random phase if there are 15 bidders or more can yield 2.6 percent or RD 500 million a year in price savings, or doing the same if a large discount is placed within three minutes to closing can yield 1.1 percent lower prices or RD 210 million a year in savings.

Auctions --- Bidding --- Contract Bidding --- Procurement --- Public Sector Development --- Public Sector Economics --- Random Closing

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The paper examines the incentives and distortions created by tax policy and administration structures that motivate individuals to undeclare or under-declare work in the new EU member countries. It analyses the tax level and the tax structure "mix" of tax instruments, the special taxation regimes set up to attract workers and entrepreneurs back into the formal economy and how tax policies such as the introduction of a "flat tax" on income from labor and capital impacted workers and entrepreneurs in terms of formalizing work. It also attempts to gain some insight into the effectiveness of tax administration by comparing some input and output measures As non-tax factors can amplify the adverse effects of taxes on the labor market and reduce the effectiveness of tax reform, some of these other economic framework conditions are also discussed. This paper concludes by refining the main results and possible best practices for tackling undeclared work. The paper argues that the new EU member countries have had mixed success tackling undeclared work. While taxation matters, other underlying conditions for formal sector activity are also important. Addressing the problem of undeclared work therefore requires a broad policy approach with further improvements in tax policies, tax administration, and in general economic framework conditions for formal sector activity.

Debt Markets --- Emerging Markets --- Informal economy --- International Economics & Trade --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public Sector Economics --- Tax administration --- Tax Law --- Tax policy --- Taxation --- Taxation & Subsidies --- Eastern Europe

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This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks and bilateral aid agencies) are a major source of financing for government spending in developing countries. These loans typically finance public spending projects that take several years to implement, with multiple disbursements linked to the stages of project implementation. The long disbursement periods for these loans imply that the bulk of government spending financed by official creditors in a given year reflects loan approval decisions made in many previous years, before current-year macroeconomic shocks are known. Loan-level commitment and disbursement transactions from the World Bank's Debtor Reporting System database are used to isolate a predetermined component of government spending associated with past loan approvals. This can be used as an instrument to estimate spending multipliers for a large sample of 102 developing countries. The one-year government spending multiplier is reasonably-precisely estimated to be around 0.4, and there is some suggestive evidence that multipliers are larger in recessions, in countries less exposed to international trade, and in countries with flexible exchange rate regimes.

Access to Finance --- Bankruptcy and Resolution of Financial Distress --- Debt Markets --- Fiscal policy --- Government spending multipliers --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Public Sector Economics --- Urban Economics

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This paper explores the reduction of food insecurity in Bolivia, adopting a supply side approach that analyzes the role of agricultural spending on vulnerability. Vulnerability to food insecurity is captured by a municipal level composite-developed locally within the framework of World Food Program food security analysis-that combines welfare outcomes, weather conditions and agricultural potential for all 327 municipalities in 2003, 2006 and 2007. Our econometric results indicate that levels of public agricultural spending are positively associated with high or very high vulnerability. The authors interpret this to indicate that agricultural spending allocation decisions are driven by high or very high vulnerability levels. In other words, more agricultural spending appears to be destined to where it is more needed in line with previous findings in other sectors in Bolivia. This is confirmed through a number of specifications, including contemporaneous and lagged relationships between spending and vulnerability. They also find evidence of public spending on infrastructure and research and extension services having a significant (but very small) effect towards reducing high vulnerability. This indicates the importance of the composition of public agricultural spending in shaping its relationship with vulnerability to food insecurity.

Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- Agriculture --- Culture & Development --- Food & Beverage Industry --- Food Insecurity --- Population Policies --- Public Agricultural Spending --- Public Sector Economics --- Resource Allocation --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Vulnerability --- Bolivia