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Budget support has become an increasingly important instrument in the context of a partnership-based approach to development assistance. Compared to traditional modes of aid delivery, it promises greater country ownership, reduced transaction costs, better donor coordination, scaling up of poverty reduction and potentially greater development effectiveness. This book presents a timely and valuable review of key concepts, issues, experiences and emerging lessons relevant to budget support. It provides an overview of principal characteristics, expectations and concerns related to budget support, key design and implementation issues, as well as some practical experiences. The contributors include government representatives from developing countries, leading academic scholars, bilateral development agencies and development practitioners from international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They present a wide range of views on key issues such as the choice of instruments, alignment of budget support with country programs, predictability, and coordination and conditionality. The authors draw their insightful analysis on the contemporary research and evaluation work, as well as the broad practical experience with budget support. This book will be of great interest to practitioners in aid-recipient countries and international financial institutions, bilateral agencies and civil organizations involved in budget support.

Whole life insurance plays an important role in household saving. However, empirical evidence on its determinants is scarce. This paper studies two natural experiments to identify the effects of tax incentives and bequest motives on life-insurance demand. An unanticipated tax reform in 2000 halved the tax exemption limit for capital income in Germany. We document that the demand for life insurance reacted strongly to this change. With regard to bequest motives, we analyze the demand for life insurance in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Relative to market-based economies, the socialist GDR can be viewed as an experimental institutional setting where life-insurance demand was not influenced by tax considerations which allows us to isolate bequest motives while controlling for life-cycle and precautionary motives. We find a significantly higher ownership probability among households with children and a high regard for the family, confirming bequest motives in life-insurance demand.

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of transitions to five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax, including a proportional consumption tax and a flat tax. The model incorporates intragenerational heterogeneity and a detailed specification of alternative tax systems. Simulation results project significant long-run increases in output for some reforms. For other reforms, namely those that seek to insulate the poor and initial older generations from adverse welfare changes, long-run output gains are modest. (JEL H20, C68)

This study uses generational accounting, a new method of long term fiscal planning, to study Portugal's fiscal policy. Specifically, it computes a set of generational accounts (GAs) for Portugal and uses them to reach an important conclusion: Portuguese fiscal policy is unsustainable. Under current fiscal rules, future Portuguese generations face a net tax (taxes paid net of transfer payments received) burden, relative to income, that is well in excess of that faced by current generations. Significant increases in taxes or reduction in expenditures are required to satisfy the government's long term (intertemporal) budget constraint and avoid unfairly burdening future generations. ; N/A