Developing Countries

A man stands in front of the Impostometro (Taxometer), which displays the amount of taxes paid by citizens of Brazil, in downtown Sao Paulo city (REUTERS/Nacho Doce).

Opinion

Tax-Policy Procyclicality

October 1, 2013, Carlos A. Vegh and Guillermo Vuletin

Carlos Vegh and Guillermo Vuletin examine recent research showing that tax policy tend to be procyclical in developing countries and acyclical in developed countries, and that while some developing countries have managed to escape the procyclical fiscal policy trap, some developed nations – notably Eurozone members – are falling into it.

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In the News

South Africa has been good to [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe because he was good to them in the darkest years of that country’s long freedom movement. I don’t think they would ever call for diaspora voting rights because they know it would work against Mugabe and he would see it as direct opposition.
July 31, 2013, Mwangi S. Kimenyi, Christian Science Monitor
In the News

Aid agencies tend to jump in to help countries, duplicating efforts and complicating matters for governments that have limited capacity to deal with so many organizations.
June 15, 2013, Laurence Chandy, Reuters
In the News

A lot depends on what you do with the investment you attract. [If Ghana sells bond after bond so it can build a string of gold-plated palaces, not so helpful. But if, after Nigeria updates its GDP, foreign investors fly to Lagos to meet up with the app designers at Pledge 51, that's clearly a good thing.] That's one of the good examples of where this can have a positive impact.
May 31, 2013, John Page, National Public Radio
In the News

Unless growth goes through the roof, it is not possible to maintain the trend rate of poverty reduction with so many fewer individuals ready to cross the line.
May 30, 2013, Laurence Chandy, The Economist
In the News

There are a crop of people at the bottom of the barrel still that are not being affected by the progress that’s being made [in the goal of universal access to primary education for all children].
April 22, 2013, Rebecca Winthrop, New York Times
In the News

[China is] also investing quite a bit in manufacturing. It’s also investing in construction. So one of the good things about Chinese engagement with Africa has been infrastructure development.
March 28, 2013, Mwangi S. Kimenyi, Marketplace
In the News

Within as little as three years, almost all adults in Kenya were banked; they were using [mobile money.] This is in a country where around two-thirds of people live below $2 a day and typically don’t have access to formal financial services.
November 22, 2012, Laurence Chandy, Voice of America
In the News

Maybe one of the problems is that special envoys [and journalists] have not been good at telling the story of what goes on [in Africa.] But I can tell you there is a story to be told because I have been brought in on some of these consultations, and this administration with regard to Africa policy has been the most open to input from the scholarly and expert community as ever.
November 12, 2012, Richard Joseph, Voice of America
In the News

[The Myanmar government] is making progress across the board on the political front, though on the social and economic fronts things are going slowly. But I don’t know of anybody who expected them to make the progress that they have at this point.
September 19, 2012, Lex Rieffel, Los Angeles Times
In the News

When we talk about poverty in the developing world, we use an absolute poverty line of a dollar a day. It doesn't matter whether the country grows richer over time, we stick with that same measure. Whereas in…Western countries, we use a relative measure of poverty, which does change over time [and] does change with the fortunes of the other people in the economy.
September 5, 2012, Laurence Chandy, CNN