Suchergebnisse

Introduction / Gabriela Inchauste and David G. Victor -- The Dominican Republic: from generalized to targeted subsidies / Andrea Gallina, Gabriela Inchauste, Pavel Isa, Catherine Lee, Miguel Sánchez -- Ghana: lessons learned, new strategies / Sheila Addo, Morgan Bazilian, Samuel Oguah -- Indonesia: pricing reforms, social assistance, and the importance of perceptions / Christopher Beaton, Lucky Lontoh, Matthew Wai-Poi -- Jordan: reform amid turmoil / Gabriela Inchauste, Yusuf Mansur, Umar Serajuddin

This book proposes a simple framework for understanding the political economy of subsidy reform and applies it to four in-depth country studies covering more than 30 distinct episodes of reform. Five key lessons emerge. First, energy subsidies often follow a life cycle, beginning as a way to stabilize prices and reduce exposure to price volatility for low-income consumers. However, as they grow in size and political power, they become entrenched. Second, subsidy reform strategies vary because the underlying political economy problems vary. When benefits are concentrated, satisfying or isolating) interest groups with alternative policies is an important condition for effective reform. When benefits are diffuse, it can be much harder to identify and manage the political coalition needed for reform. Third, governments vary in their administrative and political capacities to implement difficult energy subsidy reforms. Fourth, improvements in social protection systems are often critical to the success of reforms because they make it possible to target assistance to those most in need. Finally, the most interesting cases involve governments that take a strategic approach to the challenges of political economy. In these settings, fixing energy subsidies is central to the governments' missions of retaining political power and reorganizing how the government delivers benefits to the population. These cases are examples of "reform engineering," where governments actively seek to create the capacity to implement alternative policies, depoliticize tariffs, and build credibility around alternative policies. The most successful reforms involve active efforts by policy leaders to identify the political forces supporting energy subsidies and redirect or inoculate them.

This paper quantifies the contributions to poverty reduction observed in Sri Lanka between 2002 and 2012/13. The methods adopted for the analysis generate entire counterfactual distributions to account for the contributions of demographics, labor, and non-labor incomes in explaining poverty reduction. The findings show that the most important contributor to poverty reduction was growth in labor income, stemming from an increase in the returns to salaried nonfarm workers and higher returns to self-employed farm workers. Although some of this increase in earnings may point to improvements in productivity, defined as higher units of output per worker, some of it may simply reflect increases in food and commodity prices, which have increased the marginal revenue product of labor. To the extent that there have been no increases in the volumes being produced, the observed changes in poverty are vulnerable to reversals if commodity prices were to decline significantly. Finally, although private transfers (domestic and foreign) helped to reduce poverty over the period, public transfers were not as effective. In particular, the reduction in the real value of transfers of the Samurdhi program during 2002 to 2012/13 slowed down poverty reduction.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Fiscal Policy for Economic Development: An Overview -- Fiscal Policy, Expenditure Composition, and Growth in Low-Income Countries -- Persistence of Fiscal Adjustments and Expenditure Composition in Low-Income Countries -- Growth, Governance, and Fiscal Policy Transmission Channels in Low-Income Countries -- External Debt, Public Investment, and Growth in Low-Income Countries -- A Framework for Fiscal Debt Sustainability Analysis in Low-Income Countries -- Experience with Budgetary Convergence in the WAEMU -- The Effectiveness of Government Spending on Education and Health Care in Developing and Transition Economies -- Public Spending on Health Care and the Poor -- User Payments for Basic Education in Low-Income Countries -- The Efficiency of Government Expenditure: Experiences from Africa -- Tax Policy in Developing Countries: Some Lessons from the 1990s and Some Challenges Ahead -- Social Impact of a Tax Reform: The Case of Ethiopia -- Foreign Aid and Revenue Response: Does the Composition of Aid Matter? -- More Aid-Making It Work for the Poor -- Aid and Fiscal Management -- Foreign Aid and Consumption Smoothing: Evidence from Global Food Aid -- Fiscal Consequences of Armed Conflict and Terrorism in Low- and Middle-Income Countries -- A Comparison Between Two Public Expenditure Management Systems in Africa.

This note comes in three sections. First, the information required for political economy analysis of energy subsidy reforms is presented. Second, a summary is given of the information that can usually be obtained through desk research to provide the context for subsequent interviews and another field research. Third, information that probably requires interviews and field data collection is provided. The ultimate audience of the proposed types of analysis lies with policy reformers themselves and with external development and policy institutions that are seeking to help governments adopt more sustainable reforms. However, the direct audience for this note are those commissioning political economy analysis of energy subsidies, and technocrats, researchers, and advisers to policy makers carrying out the analysis. Often, a team made up of sector experts and political economy experts will provide a greater depth of analysis. Significant attention is devoted here to the origins and operation of existing subsidies since that history conditions what is possible for the adoption and sustainability of future reforms. The main interest and audience for this note is forward-looking, people and institutions who need to understand what is politically possible and how to realign political forces around successful reform. The authors are mindful that this role is perhaps different from other more technocratic roles of agencies and institutions focused on technical analysis and thus they also devote some attention to the processes needed to obtain and manage sensitive information and political insights since mismanagement in that realm can, itself, affect the political prospects for reform and harm the standing of reform agents in the process. In contrast to desk research or analysis of existing datasets, field research on political economy will always be an intervention in the local system, which needs to be managed well to increase and not decrease the space for reform and coalition building.

Using urban household surveys, we constructed a panel dataset to study the effects of the Argentine macroeconomic crisis of 1999-2002 with the aim of (1) identifying the most vulnerable households, (2) investigating whether employment in the public sector and government spending served to decrease vulnerability, and (3) understanding the mechanisms used by households to smooth the effects of the crisis. Households whose heads were male, less educated, and employed in the construction sector were more vulnerable to the crisis, experiencing larger-than-average declines in income and higher dispersion. Households whose heads were employed in the public sector were more protected from the crisis, although higher public spending did not serve to decrease their vulnerability. A significant source of vulnerability was linked to changes in employment status, and we studied the determinants of the probability of being unemployed and of becoming unemployed. Last, we found that households were unable to perfectly smooth income shocks. Given these results, there is room for broadening social safety nets, particularly in the form of public works programs. ; Departamento de Economía