Abstract There is a constant evidence of the growth of the foreign indebtedness in all the countries in transition, both EU member states and (pre)accession countries. Status and trends of external debt are important indicators of potential macroeconomic problems, which determines that the management of foreign debt should be a task for all governments. Thus, methodology and measurement of fore...

This paper studies the repayment of regional debt in a multi-region economy with a central authority: who pays the obligation issued by a region? With commitment, a central government will use its taxation power to smooth distortionary taxes across regions. Absent commitment, the central government may be induced to bailout the regional government in order to smooth consumption and distortionar...

Systematic violations of migrant workers' human rights and striking health disparities among these populations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the norm in member countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Migrant laborers comprise about 90 percent of the UAE workforce and include approximately 500,000 construction workers and 450,000 domestic workers. Like many other GCC members cou...

This paper simulates the impact in a calibrated small macroeconomic model of a policy that attempts to apply sufficient effective stimulus in a severe recession without increasing the government deficit or debt, or inflation. This stimuluswithout-debt policy has two components: (1) a large standard fiscal stimulus; (2) a non-standard monetary stimulus—a large transfer from the central bank to t...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided under HIPC will free government resources, the initiative will potentially help reduce poverty through l...

This paper considers appropriate debt funding strategies for state and municipal governments in the presence of a positive, tax-exempt term premium. The correlation between a measure of income from rate-sensitive assets and the tax-exempt floating rate is the principal focus of the analysis. A single period framework is used to identify the most important information required to design the opti...

This paper stems from a recent heated debate on the relationship between the price level and scal policy. While the relationship between in ation, government de cits and debt has a long tradition in macroeconomics, a recent string of papers has put a new twist on it by proposing a \ scal theory of the price level", which shows that the government can target directly the price level by using sca...

The paper presents a model of fiscal and monetary policy that evaluates the tradeoff be­ tween higher distortionary labor taxation and higher ination in the resolution of fiscal crises. In the model government debt is domestically held and nominal. Data are presented to show that such debt is now at least as important as external government debt in many key emerg­ ing markets, and that it is a...

This paper uses yearly panel data on OECD countries to analyze the relationship between growth and the cyclicality of government debt. We develop new time-varying estimates of the cyclicality of public debt. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) less procyclical public debt growth can have significantly positive effects on productivity growth, in particular when financial developm...

Political economy theory expects politicians to use budget deficits to engineer an election-timed boom, known as the political business cycle. We challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the financial constraints faced by governments into an electoral framework. We argue theoretically that the extent of ownership dispersion among creditors has important effects for governments’ po...