Though many aspects of Russia's fiscal policy framework are close to best practice on paper, actual practice in recent years has been moving away from best practice. In particular, the continued focus on the overall rather than the nonoil balance, and the regular use of supplemental budgets to spend windfall oil revenues contribute to procylicality of fiscal policy, risking costly boom-bust cycles. Against this background, this paper suggests several improvements to the framework for fiscal policy
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
AbstractThe part of the UK fiscal framework which determines how UK government funding is allocated across the four home nations has undergone profound change since 2012, given tax and social security devolution. The UK government's post-Brexit plans for regional development funding, state aid, regulation and trade negotiations have led to significant disagreements about the nature of the devolved fiscal and constitutional settlement. And the COVID-19 pandemic provided a major shock to a fiscal system with limited flexibility for the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolved governments. This paper reviews the changes and challenges faced during these reforms and policy shocks. We find that: tensions about reforms to funding arrangements reflect the inconsistency of principles guiding the reforms; that the UK government's post-Brexit plans do reduce the policy autonomy of the devolved governments, but reflect powers central governments often have in even highly decentralised countries; and that temporary changes to rules and the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented a subnational fiscal crisis, but that more systematic change may make the system more robust to future shocks. This suggests that a review of the principles underpinning the UK's subnational fiscal and economic policies would be highly worthwhile.
The report is part of a series of learning products with limited objectives geared towards synthesizing existing knowledge as well as learning and gaining new insights into the factors that influence design, policy implementation, and performance of development policy loans. It aims to provide fresh insights and build on previous evaluations of Bank investment projects and research and analytical work (for example, recent independent evaluation group (IEG) work on development policy operations (DPOs) includes the evaluation of poverty reduction support credits (PRSCs), first and second financial crisis evaluations (which examined crisis DPOs), recent operations policy and country services (OPCS) DPO retrospectives, and new research presented in this report on aspects of DPOs using a combination of approaches). The quality of macro frameworks in DPOs alone has not been subject of in-depth study. This report aims to contribute to filling that gap with a: (i) preliminary analysis of the quality of macro-fiscal frameworks in DPOs, and (ii) a comprehensive database of project level DPOs and related country and economic policy and statistical information, which is a byproduct of the study.
European Economic and Monetary Union faces the most serious crisis since its foundation. The concept of the Union with a single monetary policy and autonomous fiscal policy, which is partially limited by the fiscal rules, as defined by the Maastricht Treaty (later confirmed by the Lisbon Treaty) and specified by the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact, has proved to be totally inadequate to address the problems of fiscal discipline of the member states. In such circumstances, the need for institutional reform of the European Economic and Monetary Union has been imposed. Revised fiscal rules and regulations on the coordination of economic policies promote institutional base of EMU. The effectiveness and credibility of the new fiscal framework depends on its strict application, readiness of the Commission to monitor fiscal discipline of the member states and the willingness of other institution, firs of all Council to limit the degree of political discretion.
The author author was approached by the Clerks of the committee to comment on the Scotland Bill and Fiscal Framework, since the publication of the Committee's Interim Report published in May 2015. This is his written submission.
