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The Global Financial Crisis: Comparisons with the Great Depression and Scenarios for Recovery
PREMNote
141
A recent paper by Eichengreen and ORourke on A Tale of Two Depressions (publicized by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times) has highlighted some close correspondences between economic performance during the present world recession and that during the early months of the Great Depression that began in late 1929. World industrial production from April 2008 to April 2009 fell as rapidly as during the first year of the Great Depression, while stock market prices and world trade volumes have fallen more rapidly than in the comparable period.
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Fiscal Policy for Growth
PREMNote
131
The very minimum that a government is expected to do nowadays in any
country is to remove or cut down the obstacles to economic growth met by
the private sector and, much more frequently, it is deemed to have the task of striving for growth in a positive manner both by example and by precept.A.R. Prest (1972), Public Finance in Undeveloped Countries, p. 17
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On the Marriage between Public Spending and Growth: What Else Do We Know?
PREMNote
130
While there are strong theoretical arguments for ways in which public spending influences growth, robust empirical links have been difficult to establish. More recently, many of the methodological problems that plagued the earlier literature have been overcome and interesting policy lessons drawn. The number of studies of developing countries using these new approaches is still limited, due to data scarcity and other comparability issues, but overall findings from the new literature are relevant for developing country policy makers and also open new venues for future research. The objective of this note is to present these new empirical results together with the methodological improvements that support them, and to outline some of the issues that need deeper analysis and empirical study, particularly in developing countries.
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Linking Fiscal Policy and Growth in PER Reports: An Operational Framework for Low-Income
PREMNote
129
Public expenditure reviews (PERs) could be a key analytical tool in policy dialogue and World Bank financial support (normally under Development Policy Loans) to public finance reforms. However, there is a widely held perceptions that some PERs are analytically weak when it comes to linking fiscal policy choices and their economic growth implications.
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Subnational Fiscal Sustainability Analysis
PREMNote
117
Subnational fiscal sustainability is important because an insolvent government cannot provide public services. Although the basic sustainability framework applies to any government, subnational fiscal adjustment qualitatively differs from the national one, reflecting the interplay of subnational and national policies.
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Millennium Development Goals and Africa: An Alternate View
PREMNote
116
In this PREM Note, Danny Leipziger argues that although the MDG goals could have been better specified, they have served a purpose, namely, to galvanize support among concerned donors to increase official aid flows as well as to focus attention on the one continent where poverty rates have moved little in recent decades.
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Tracking Financial Flows after Disasters (RETAM)
PREMNote
114
This note presents a financial tracking methodology developed by the World Banks Indonesia country team. Following the tsunami and the subsequent earthquakes in Nias (2005) and Yogyakarta (2006), the team has produced several reconstruction finance updates and monitored the sources and uses of the funding. The methodology is a relatively simple accounting tool centered on the generation of a core table to facilitate sectoral and geographical analysis and is based on three methodological principles: (i) the comprehensiveness of expenditures; (ii) a specific focus on reconstruction expenditures; and (iii) matching the sectoral classifications in the Damage and Loss Assessment.
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