To finance basic pro-poor services, the Government of Ghana must mobilize more public revenue. But tax reform has been highly controversial in Ghana. An attempt to introduce VAT in 1995 failed after widespread protests. Although a second attempt to introduce VAT in 1998 succeeded, strong resistance to tax reform remains, and the total tax base remains narrow and over-dependent on petroleum taxe...

Following massive government interventions during the great recession of 20072009, governments’ indebtedness has skyrocketed around the globe. These dramatic financing needs raise uncertainty about the future stance of fiscal policies and their effects on the growth prospects of the economy. In this paper, we reconsider the link between short-run stabilization and uncertainty about long-term fi...

Imperfectly competitive macroeconomic models typically assume a symmetric equilibrium with identical firms, despite the fact that most industries are characterised by substantial degrees of firm heterogeneity. We examine how inter-firm efficiency gaps affect fiscal policy effectiveness under monopolistic competition.  2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.

Since the proof of Theorem 1 is rather cumbersome, it is useful to break it into several lemmas.