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The book considers when governments should give guarantees to private investors. After describing the history of guarantees, and the challenges the politics and psychology create for good decisions, the book sets out principles for allocating risk (and therefore guarantees), techniques for valuing guarantees, and rules to encourage good decisions.

Intro -- CONTENTS -- Foreword -- Abstract -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Summary -- 2 Introduction -- 3 Clarifying the Objectives of Fiscal Support -- 4 Considering Policy Options Other Than Fiscal Support -- 5 Identifying the Instruments of Fiscal Support -- 6 Comparing the Cost of Different Instruments -- 7 Comparing the Accuracy of Different Instruments -- 8 Narrowing Down the Choice by Considering Transparency and Targeting -- 9 Improving Institutions for Decisionmaking -- 10 Concluding Remarks -- Annex: Valuing Revenue Guarantees and Variable Subsidies -- References -- BOXES -- FIGURES -- TABLES.

The extent of fiscal transparency in Western Europe has varied over the centuries. Although ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval governments were sometimes open about their finances, the absolute monarchies of the 1600s and 1700s shrouded them in mystery. Factorsthat have encouraged transparency include (i) the sharing of political power and rulers' need to persuade creditors to lend and taxpayers' representatives to approve new taxes; (ii) the spread of technological innovations that reduce the costs of storing and transmitting information; and (iii) the acceptance of political theories that em

In its standard form, the intertemporal budget constraint requires the present value of a government's future primary cash surpluses to be at least equal to the value of its outstanding debt. In an effort to help link accrual accounting to fiscal analysis, this paper shows how the constraint can also be expressed in terms of the surpluses and balance sheets of the accrual‐based accounts and fiscal statistics that are increasingly supplementing and sometimes replacing traditional cash‐only accounting.