Suchergebnisse

In recent decades, Zimbabwe's development record has been disappointing. In the last few years, a severe drought and the Covid-19 pandemic have added to the country's development challenges. This paper is concerned with the long-run need to find a path toward faster growth in GDP, employment, and incomes, accompanied by more rapid progress on poverty reduction and other parts of the global sustainable development agenda. As part of this search, the country will need to address structural constraints including a large infrastructure gap, an inefficient government, and unhospitable business climate. Among these, this paper is focused on infrastructure and alternative means of financing scaled-up investments – what are the consequences of relying on domestic taxes compared to foreign financing? To address these questions, the paper draws on simulations with SDGSIM, a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, designed for SDG analysis but applicable to analysis of policies in a wide range of areas, including growth, fiscal space, and external shocks. The model was adapted to the Zimbabwean context and calibrated to a database for 2016. The simulations cover the period 2016-2030 and analyzes the effects of alternative levels and priorities for government spending and resource mobilization (domestic and foreign). The simulation results cover a wide range of economic indicators, including some related to the global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda. The differences between the scenario results for GDP growth, household consumption, and poverty point to the importance of strong public investment management and, other things being equal, of targeting TFP gains to tradable sectors. The advantages of reliance on domestic taxation for the funding of expanded investment include slower debt accumulation and less reliance on the decisions of external actors. Tax reliance may also give the funders, the citizens, a stronger sense of ownership and right to monitor how the money is used, with a positive impact on investment productivity. On the other hand, before the investment have yielded sufficient returns, reliance on taxes reduces private purchasing power, leading to some combination of lower private consumption and investment. Raising the tax burden by 2-3 percent of GDP may also be administratively difficult. It would of course be possible to consider scenarios that split the funding burden between domestic taxes and foreign financing. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales

Las crisis recientes han demostrado que América Latina sigue siendo altamente vulnerable a los choques externos. A pesar de la recuperación económica que desde fines del año 2009, la vulnerabilidad externa prevalece debido a la alta volatilidad de los mercados mundiales. Las opciones de un crecimiento sostenible y de reducción de la pobreza dependerán en alto grado de las capacidades de los países para mitigar esa volatilidad y su impacto sobre el bienestar de la población. Diversas simulaciones generadas para siete países de la región mediante el modelo de equilibrio general computable denominado MACEPES, demuestran que choques externos típicos de un contexto de crisis mundial (deterioro en los términos de intercambio, salida de capitales y reducción de las remesas) contraen la demanda agregada y el empleo, generando "desprotección" social y más pobreza en ausencia de políticas anti-cíclicas. Ante la eventualidad de choques externos, las transferencias directas a los hogares son altamente efectivas en términos de reducir la pobreza, incluso una vez considerado el impacto contractivo de su financiamiento sobre la inversión. Este instrumento podría implementarse en el marco de programas de transferencias condicionadas a la educación o de pensiones no contributivas, pero se plantea como reto la movilización de recursos para su financiamiento.

This paper makes two contributions to the debate on the compatibility of social cost benefit analysis and economic impact analysis. First we argue that benefits estimated through economic impact analysis are amenable to subsequent analysis in a social cost benefit framework when household utility is used as the measure of welfare. Second, economic impact analysis and social cost benefit analysis of investment loans may be evaluated from the perspective of the multilateral lender and from that of the beneficiary government. While the first is straightforward to implement, this paper develops an approach to evaluating the investment from the perspective of the beneficiary government which internalizes the repayment of the loan within the economic impact model itself. We compare these two perspectives by undertaking an economic impact and social cost benefit analysis of a US$6.25 million tourism investment in Uruguay. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

Ex-ante economic impact analyses are required to demonstrate the development impact and economic viability of loans and grants extended by multi-lateral development banks. These assessments are performed under tight time constraints and often in data poor environments. This paper develops a framework for assessing development interventions in data poor environments and applies it to the analysis of the Sustainable Tourism Program, a US$15 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to the Government of Belize to foster tourism development in emerging destinations and enhance participation of low income people in the tourism value chain. This paper contributes to the literature in two critical ways: (i) the paper develops a generalizable approach to building dynamic computable general equilibrium models for development policy analysis in data poor environments; (ii) realistic expectations of agent behavioral responses to development interventions are required to calibrate model simulations. To estimate business as usual tourism arrivals and expenditure, auto-regressive integrated moving average methods were used. To estimate agent response to the development intervention, a survey-based quasi-contingent valuation approach was employed. These projections and information on investment structuring and costs were used to calibrate the model shocks. Results of this analysis show that the proposed investment will have positive impacts on Belize's economy by hastening economic growth. Gross domestic product increases 3% by 2040 and unemployment falls from 12% to 10%. Cross validating with a break-even scenario confirms that the Government of Belize would recover all investment costs even if actual agent demand response were considerably less than forecast. The model developed here may be applied to the ex-ante economic analysis of other sectoral development interventions ranging from agricultural policy to fiscal policy, from integration and trade, to health and education. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

The Dominican Republic (DR) has committed itself to work towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Recent data indicate that the DR has made considerable progress on the MDGs but that an acceleration of efforts is needed for the country to reach all the goals.2 This chapter focuses on two key questions: Will the DR achieve all of the MDGs under current policies and trends? If not, what policy changes are needed to achieve the MDGs and at what cost? The second question incorporates alternative assumptions about the sources (domestic or foreign) of required additional government financing. We address these questions using MAMS (MAquette for MDG Simulations3), a dynamic-recursive computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for country strategy analysis, and a micro-simulation model. Such an economywide approach is needed given that the simulated policy changes have strong effects throughout the economy. Section 1 below provides background on the general economy and MDGs since 1990. Section 2 presents our methods and database, and Section 3 the simulations and an analysis of their results. Section 4 concludes with a summary of our main findings. ; Trabajo publicado en Vos, R.; Ganuza, E.; Lofgren, H.; Sánchez, M. V. y Diaz-Bonilla, C. (eds.). Políticas públicas para el desarrollo humano . UQBAR, Santiago, Chile. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

Using the most recent estimates of agricultural price distortions, this chapter studies the economic, poverty, and income inequality impacts of both global and domestic trade reform in Argentina, with a special focus on export taxes. Argentina offers an interesting case study as the only large agricultural exporter that has, at many points in its history, applied export taxes to several of its agricultural products. The chapter combines results from a global economy-wide model (World Bank's linkage model), a national computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, and micro-simulations. The results suggest that liberalization of world trade (including subsidies and import taxes, but not export taxes), both for agricultural and non-agricultural goods, reduces poverty and inequality in Argentina. However, if only agricultural goods are included, indicators for poverty and inequality do not improve and even deteriorate somewhat. This is particularly the case if export taxes are eliminated. The chapter discusses the possible reasons for those results, offers some caveats, and suggests some lines for further research.

La "bichera" es una enfermedad parasitaria que produce pérdidas cuantiosas en la ganadería uruguaya -principalmente por las horas de trabajo dedicadas a su prevención y tratamiento y por la muerte de ovinos. En este trabajo, se utiliza un modelo de equilibrio general computable dinámico para estimar los efectos que tendría una política pública para su erradicación sobre indicadores tanto macroeconómicos como sectoriales y de corto y largo plazo. Los resultados muestran impactos positivos sobre el nivel de la actividad económica, incluyendo indicadores del mercado laboral como salarios y empleo. Por otro lado, la apreciación del tipo de cambio real que genera el incremento de las exportaciones vinculadas a la ganadería impacta negativamente sobre otros sectores transables de la economía uruguaya. El análisis considera, además, tres fuentes alternativas de financiamiento del gasto público adicional. ; The New World Screwworm (NWS) fly causes a parasitic disease that produces large losses in Uruguayan livestock farming – mainly due to the working hours devoted to its prevention and treatment and the death of sheep. In this paper, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to estimate the macroeconomic and sectoral effects of eradicating the NWS. The results show positive impacts on overall output and labor market indicators such as wages and employment. On the other hand, the appreciation of the real exchange rate generated by the increase in livestock exports has a negative impact on other tradable sectors of the Uruguayan economy. Besides, we consider three alternative financing sources for the additional government spending. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales

We analyzed the impact of currency devaluation on the Bolivian economy, employing a dynamic and extended version of the PEP 1-1 standard model to simulate effects impact on both the main macroeconomic aggregates and the financial stocks and flows of economic agents. We built a new Financial Social Accounting Matrix for the year 2014 and calibrated the model to it. Besides simulating a devaluation of the nominal exchange rate, we also analyzed a policy-response scenario, an external-shock scenario, and a gradual-devaluation scenario. In the policy-response scenario, devaluation was accompanied by a reduction in government expenses (fiscal adjustment); in the external-shock scenario, devaluation came with an increase in the export price of gas (main export commodity); and, in the gradual-devaluation scenario, the exchange-rate policy relaxed gradually. The external-shock scenario dominated the other scenarios in terms of higher average growth and less average unemployment. The fiscal-adjustment scenario, however, dominated in terms of inflation, though it implied an inflationary shock in 2020. ; Facultad de Ciencias Económicas ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales

In this paper we evaluate the economic, natural capital and ecosystem services impacts of strategies for conserving Colombias rich natural capital endowment. Specifically, we consider Government program proposals for establishing Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), implementing more sustainable silvopastoral systems and expanding habitat banking. We develop and apply the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform linked with spatial Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and Ecosystem Services Modeling (IEEMESM) to shed light on the multi-dimensional impacts of these programs from the perspective of sustainable economic development and intergenerational wealth. Advancing the state-of-the-art in integrated economic-environmental modeling, our framework for the first time integrates dynamic endogenous feedbacks between natural capital, ecosystem services and the economic system to fully capture how changes in natural capital and ecosystem service flows affect the economy and vice versa. Our approach quantitatively models the economy, natural capital and ecosystem services as one integrated and complex system at a high level of spatial resolution across Colombias 32 Departments. [.]

Once the current political crisis in Yemen has been resolved, it will be ever more urgent to speed up progress, including Millennium Development Goal (MDG) achievements. Drawing on simulations with the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS), a model for strategy analysis, and a linked microsimulation model, this paper addresses Yemen's MDG challenges. A first simulation set considers scaled-up government actions with the aim of fully achieving the 2015 international MDG targets with required additional financing from foreign or domestic sources. The main finding is sobering but not surprising: given the required expansion of MDG-related services, on-time achievement of key MDG targets does not appear to have been a realistic objective even if the government, hypothetically, would have expanded services with grant aid financing starting from 2005; macroeconomic stability, government efficiency, and the production of tradables would all have suffered due to the size of spending and aid increases as well as the resulting real exchange rate appreciation. The results suggest that countries, instead of relying on international targets, should set MDG targets grounded in their own reality. In light of these results, the authors designed a second simulation set that is focused on the remaining period up to 2015, and on what may be feasible once the current conflict has been settled. The simulations introduce moderate increases in foreign aid or government allocative efficiency. The government uses the resulting fiscal space for spending and service expansion in infrastructure and human development without losses in productive efficiency. The results suggest that, under these conditions, substantial improvements could still be achieved. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)