Developing Asia’s Fiscal Landscape and Challenges

Eugenia Go (), Sam Hill (), Maria Hanna Jaber (), Yothin Jinjarak, Donghyun Park and Anton Ragos ()
Additional contact information
Eugenia Go: World Bank
Sam Hill: World Bank
Maria Hanna Jaber: Asian Development Bank
Anton Ragos: Asian Development Bank

No 665, ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank

Abstract: What are the salient features of developing Asia’s tax revenues and public expenditures? How do these compare with other economies and how have they been affected by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic? To analyze these issues we assemble data across economies drawing on a range of sources to maximize temporal and coverage of economies. We find that while tax revenues in developing Asia steadily rose in the 2 decades before COVID-19, they continued to lag behind high-income economies and some developing peers. The region relies on indirect taxes, particularly consumption taxes, creating a relatively efficient but less progressive tax structure. Alongside these lower tax revenues, government expenditures on education and health were comparatively modest. Substantial fiscal policy stimulus in response to COVID-19 comprised both tax and expenditure measures which, combined with the impact of the downturn on revenues, has severely weakened public finances in many developing Asian economies.

Keywords: tax revenue; government expenditure; pandemic crisis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E62 H12 H20 H30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2022-06-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-mac, nep-pub and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.adb.org/publications/developing-asia-fiscal-landscape-challenges Full text (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Developing Asia's fiscal landscape and challenges (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:adbewp:0665

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ADB Economics Working Paper Series from Asian Development Bank 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Orlee Velarde ().