Suchergebnisse

This exciting new volume provides an up-to-date overview of the current state of taxation in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, its main reform needs, and possible reform strategies that take into account the likely economic, institutional, and political constraints on the reform process

Taxation in Latin America is largely viewed as a means of generating income to keep the government in business. In recent years, progress has been made towards increasing total revenue, but most countries in the region still lag well behind other countries with similar levels of development. More importantly, Latin American policymakers still largely ignore the potential of taxation to contribute to other important development goals. Yet dependence on consumption taxes such as the VAT and the regressive bent of the personal income tax structure have squandered the opportunity to attack the region's serious income inequality. In addition, the importance of efficiency in taxation has also been underestimated with a proliferation of inefficient ad hoc taxes such as those on bank transactions and exports. Governments have repeatedly missed the chance to influence consumption and production patterns by using taxes to effect relative price changes. "More than Revenue" aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the current state of taxation in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, its main reform needs, and possible reform strategies that take into account the likely economic, institutional, and political constraints on the reform process

Vor dem Hintergrund des permanent hohen Grads sozialer Ungleichheit in Mexiko diskutiert der vorliegende Beitrag die Erfahrungen des Landes mit sozialen Leistungsprogrammen. Eine Anzahl von neueren Regierungsinitiativen beabsichtigte, durch sozialpolitische Ausgabenprogramme bei gleichzeitiger effizienterer Gestaltung der öffentlichen Ausgaben eine gleichmäßigere und gerechtere Einkommensverteilung zu bewirken. Der Beitrag prüft anhand der verfügbaren sozialpolitischen Daten, inwieweit diese Programme erfolgreich waren und skizziert, welche weiteren politischen Optionen zur Verbesserung der öffentlichen Ausgabenpolitik zur Verfügung stehen. (ICAÜbers)

Birth registration is not only a fundamental human right, but also a requirement for obtaining additional documents, proving legal identity, and accessing a number of government benefits. Yet, little is known about the effects of birth under-registration on access to health care. Using data from the Dominican Republic, this paper is the first to shed light on the causal impact of the lack of birth registration on childhood immunization, one of the key components of public services in many developing countries. Controlling for potential endogeneity and standard socioeconomic determinants of immunization, this paper finds that children between 0 and 59 months of age that do not have birth certificates are behind by nearly one vaccine (out of a total of nine) compared to those that have birth certificates. The results are robust to several robustness tests and threats to the exclusion restriction of the instrumental variables. Birth underregistration specifically reduces the probability of vaccination against polio, diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus-once leading causes of child morbidity and infant mortality. In addition, untimely vaccination costs governments billions per year in treatment and rehabilitation.

Gains from government crime-reducing programs are not always visible to the average citizen. The media overexpose crime events, but the absence of crime rarely makes the news, increasing the risk that citizen may have inaccurate perceptions of security. Through a survey experiment carried out in Bogota, Colombia, a city that experienced a substantial reduction in homicides over the last decade, as well as a noticeable drop in robberies, this paper tests the effect that communicating objective crime trends could have on such perceptions. The results show that information improves perceptions of safety and police effectiveness, and lowers distrust in the police. However, the information treatment is not able to impact those with biased priors, and tends to weaken over time. A more active and regular engagement with citizens regarding these trends is needed to bridge the gap between perception and reality.

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

AbstractAn influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.