S. M. Ali Abbas

Jan Gottschalk

Fuad Hasanov

Greetje Everaert

Olivier Basdevant

Mr. Mauricio Villafuerte

Ms. Cemile Sancak

Ricardo Velloso

Stephanie Eble

Junhyung Park

In response to the global financial crisis, governments provided substantial support to the financial and other key sectors. Although this cushioned the adverse effects of the crisis, it is necessary now to articulate a strategy to ensure the sustainability of public finances. This paper discusses the scale and composition of fiscal adjustment that will need to occur once the recovery is securely under way. Although specific country-level circumstances will influence the composition of the adjustment and its political feasibility, in many cases restoring fiscal sustainability will require reforms to reduce spending and increase tax revenue.

Strategies for Fiscal Consolidation in the Post-Crisis World

Mr. Sukhmani Bedi

Mr. Alexander Klemm

This paper assembles a new dataset on corporate income tax regimes in 50 emerging and developing economies over 1996-2007 and analyzes their impact on corporate tax revenues and domestic and foreign investment. It computes effective tax rates to take account of complicated special regimes, such as partial tax holidays, temporarily reduced rates and increased investment allowances. There is evidence of a partial race to the bottom: countries have been under pressure to lower tax rates in order to lure and boost investment. In the case of standard tax systems (i.e. tax rules applying under normal circumstances), the effective tax rate reductions have not been larger than those witnessed in advanced economies, and revenues have held up well over the sample period. However, a race to the bottom is evident among special regimes, most notably in the case of Africa, creating effectively a parallel tax system where rates have fallen to almost zero. Regression analysis reveals higher tax rates adversely affect domestic investment and FDI, but do raise revenues in the short-run.

Corporate Tax Developments in Emerging and Developing Economies

A Partial Race to the Bottom

Mark De Broeck

Laura Blattner

Ms.Asmaa ElGanainy

Malin Hu

We examine how the composition of public debt, broken down by currency, maturity, holder profile and marketability, has responded to major debt accumulation and consolidation episodes during 1900-2011. Covering thirteen advanced economies, we focus on debt structure shifts that occurred around the two World Wars and global economic downturns, and the subsequent debt consolidations. Notwithstanding data gaps, we are able to recover some broad common patterns. Episodes of large debt accumulation—essentially, large increases in debt supply— were typically absorbed by increases in short-term, foreign currency-denominated, and banking-system-held debt. However, this pattern did not hold during the debt build-ups starting in the 1980s and 1990s, which were compositionally skewed toward long-term local-currency debt. We attribute this change to higher structural demand for sovereign paper, linked to capital account liberalization in advanced economies, the emergence of a large contractual saving sector, and innovative sovereign debt products. With regard to debt consolidations, we find support for the financial repression-cum-inflation channel for post World War II debt reductions. However, the scope for a repeat of this strategy appears limited unless financial liberalization and globalization were materially rolled back or the current globally agreed monetary policy regime built around price stability abandoned. Neither are significant favorable structural demand shifts, as witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s, likely.

A Historical Perspective

Sovereign Debt Composition in Advanced Economies

Mr.Kenneth Rogoff

The last decade or so has seen a mushrooming of new sovereign debt databases covering long time spans for several countries. This represents an important breakthrough for economists who have long sought to, but been unable to tackle, first-order questions such as why countries have differential debt tolerance, and how debt levels affect the scope for countercyclical policy in recessions and financial crises. This paper backdrops these recent data efforts, identifying both the key innovations, as well as caveats that users should be aware of. A Directory of existing publicly-available sovereign debt databases, featuring compilations by institutions and individual researchers, is also included.

A Guide to Sovereign Debt Data

S. M. Ali Abbas

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