Public sector balance sheets provide the most comprehensive picture of public wealth. They bring together all the accumulated assets and liabilities that the government controls, including public corporations, natural resources, and pension liabilities. They thus account for the entirety of what the state owns and owes, offering a broader fiscal picture beyond debt and deficits. Most governments do not provide such transparency, thereby avoiding the additional scrutiny it brings. Better balance sheet management enables countries to increase revenues, reduce risks, and improve fiscal policymaking. There is some empirical evidence that financial markets are increasingly paying attention to the entire government balance sheet and that strong balance sheets enhance economic resilience. This issue of the Fiscal Monitor presents a new database that shows comprehensive estimates of public sector assets and liabilities for a broad sample of 31 countries, covering 61 percent of the global economy, and provides tools to analyze and manage public wealth. Estimates of public wealth reveal the full scale of public assets and liabilities. Assets are worth US$101 trillion or 219 percent of GDP in the sample. This includes 120 percent of GDP in public corporation assets. Also included are natural resources that average 110 percent of GDP among the large natural-resource-producing countries. Recognizing these assets does not negate the vulnerabilities associated with the standard measure of general government public debt, comprising 94 percent of GDP for these countries. This is only half of total public sector liabilities of 198 percent of GDP, which also includes 46 percent of GDP in already accrued pension liabilities. Once governments understand the size and nature of public assets, they can start managing them more effectively. Potential gains from better asset management are considerable. Revenue gains from nonfinancial public corporations and government financial assets alone could be as high as 3 percent of GDP a year, equivalent to annual corporate tax collections across advanced economies. In addition, considerable gains could be realized from government nonfinancial assets. Public assets are a significant resource, and how governments use and report on them matters, not just for financial reasons, but also in terms of improving service delivery and preventing the misuse of resources that often results from a lack of transparency.

This report emphasizes the environmental, fiscal, economic, and administrative case for using carbon taxes, or similar pricing schemes such as emission trading systems, to implement climate mitigation strategies. It provides a quantitative framework for understanding their effects and trade-offs with other instruments and applies it to the largest advanced and emerging economies. Alternative approaches, like “feebates” to impose fees on high polluters and give rebates to cleaner energy users, can play an important role when higher energy prices are difficult politically. At the international level, the report calls for a carbon price floor arrangement among large emitters, designed flexibly to accommodate equity considerations and constraints on national policies. The report estimates the consequences of carbon pricing and redistribution of its revenues for inequality across households. Strategies for enhancing the political acceptability of carbon pricing are discussed, along with supporting measures to promote clean technology investments.

Global public debt is elevated. It is projected to exceed US$100 trillion in 2024 and will rise over the medium term. This chapter shows that risks to the debt outlook are heavily tilted to the upside. In a severely adverse scenario, global debt is estimated to be nearly 20 percentage points of GDP higher three years ahead than the baseline projection, reaching 115 percent of GDP. Much larger fiscal adjustments than currently planned are required to stabilize (or reduce) debt with high probability. Now is an opportune time for rebuilding fiscal buffers and delaying is costly. Rebuilding fiscal buffers in a growth-friendly manner and strengthening fiscal governance is essential to ensure sustainable public finances and financial stability.

The report explores how fiscal policy can foster resilience by protecting households against large income and employment losses. Governments face increasingly difficult trade-offs in tackling the spikes in food and energy prices when policy buffers are largely exhausted after two years of pandemic. They should prioritize protecting vulnerable groups through targeted support while keeping a tight fiscal stance to help reduce inflation. Building fiscal buffers in normal times would allow governments to respond swiftly and flexibly during adversities. Several fiscal tools, such as job-retention schemes, have proven useful to preserve jobs and income for workers. Social safety nets should be made more readily scalable and better targeted, leveraging digital technologies. Exceptional support to firms should be reserved for severe situations and requires sound fiscal risk management.

This paper describes the compilation of the Global Debt Database (GDD), a cutting-edge dataset covering private and public debt for virtually the entire world (190 countries) dating back to the 1950s. The GDD is the result of a multiyear investigative process that started with the October 2016 Fiscal Monitor, which pioneered the expansion of private debt series to a global sample. It differs from existing datasets in three major ways. First, it takes a fundamentally new approach to compiling historical data. Where most debt datasets either provide long series with a narrow and changing definition of debt or comprehensive debt concepts over a short period, the GDD adopts a multidimensional approach by offering multiple debt series with different coverages, thus ensuring consistency across time. Second, it more than doubles the cross-sectional dimension of existing private debt datasets. Finally, the integrity of the data has been checked through bilateral consultations with officials and IMF country desks of all countries in the sample, setting a higher data quality standard.

At the global level, inequality has declined substantially over the past three decades, but within national boundaries, the picture is mixed: some countries have experienced a reduction in inequality while others, particularly advanced economies, have seen a significant increase that has, among other things, contributed to growing public backlash against globalization. Excessive levels of inequality can erode social cohesion, lead to political polarization, and ultimately lower economic growth, but whether inequality is excessive depends on country-specific factors, including the growth context in which inequality arises, along with societal preferences. This Fiscal Monitor focuses on how fiscal policy can help governments address high levels of inequality while minimizing potential trade-offs between efficiency and equity. It documents recent trends in income inequality, including inequality both between and within countries, then examines the redistributive role of fiscal policies over recent decades and underscores the importance of appropriate design to minimize any efficiency costs. It then focuses on some key components of fiscal redistribution: progressivity of income taxation, universal basic income, and public spending policies for achieving more equitable education and health outcomes. The analysis relies on the existing theoretical and empirical literature, IMF work on inequality and fiscal policy, country experiences, and new analytical work, including various static microsimulation analyses based on household survey data. Simulations using a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to country-specific data and behavioral parameters illustrate the potential impact of alternative budget-neutral tax and transfer measures on income inequality and economic growth.

Digitization promises to reshape fiscal policy by transforming how governments collect, process, share, and act on information. More and higher-quality information can improve not only policy design for tax and spending, but also systems for their management, including tax administration and compliance, delivery of public services, administration of social programs, public financial management, and more. Countries must chart their own paths to effectively balance the potential benefits against the risks and challenges, including institutional and capacity constraints, privacy concerns, and new avenues for fraud and evasion. Support for this book and the conference on which it is based was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “Click Download on the top right corner for your free copy..."

This report discusses fiscal policies to prepare for the next downturn and foster long-term inclusive growth by adapting to changing demographics, advancing technology, and deepening global integration. It also covers recent fiscal developments and the fiscal outlook in advanced economies, emerging markets, and low-income developing countries; recent trends in government debt and analysis of changes in fiscal balances, revenue, and spending; and potential fiscal risks. The report takes on in-depth look at how corruption impacts government policies and operations, the fiscal costs, and how fiscal institutions can help fight corruption.

Drawing from current examples from a variety of countries, Public Finance: An International Perspective addresses the main issues in contemporary public finance, including fiscal sustainability, state enterprises, and a variety of subsidies. There are relatively few textbooks on public finance, and many of them focus on the experience and issues facing the United States. This book sets out to address the critical issues from other countries, particularly those from the developing world or emerging market countries, who have received less attention in other texts. Written in a highly accessible manner, this book is a useful reference for students and practitioners alike.

The book discusses contemporary issues such as global financial architecture and regulatory practices, trade, investment and the multilateral process, the future of work, the role of technology for adaptation and mitigation of climate change, and financing infrastructure for sustainable development. With increasing global connectivity, events in one part of the world immediately affect or spread to the other parts. In this context, G20 has proved to be an effective forum, particularly after the Asian financial crises. Furthermore, over recent decades, G20 has been instrumental in managing financial crises and international conflicts by deploying global cooperation as a functional tool. As a body responding to crises, the G20 has played a central role in providing the political momentum for the strong international cooperation that ensured greater policy coherence and helped ease situations that could otherwise have been decidedly worse. The G20’s agendas have encompassed short-term but critical issues of economic recovery, the sovereign crisis of Europe, high unemployment and financial sector regulation. But since moderate stabilization in the global economic environment, the focus of the group has also embraced long-term areas of governance and development. For emerging economies, such as India, the G20 has been an important platform framework to promote an inclusive global economic architecture that seeks to achieve equitable outcomes. This book reviews the past 20 years of the G20, since it was conceptualized as a replacement for the G-7. While issues such as global financial order have been a constant area of discussion, one of the failures has been not recognizing and acknowledging the importance of issues like trade, climate change and future of work. Featuring academic papers by experts in the area, this book provides a platform for the necessary discourse on these issues.