Kazakhstan - Oil rules : Kazakhstan's policy options in a downturn - Joint Economic Research Program (Anglais)

Kazakhstan grew rapidly in the first half of the 2000s and made considerable progress in reducing poverty. In the years preceding the crisis, Kazakhstan maintained a prudent macroeconomic policy stance and avoided procyclicality in fiscal spending. In...  Voir la suite Kazakhstan grew rapidly in the first half of the 2000s and made considerable progress in reducing poverty. In the years preceding the crisis, Kazakhstan maintained a prudent macroeconomic policy stance and avoided procyclicality in fiscal spending. In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2009, Kazakhstan adopted a fixed fiscal rule to govern the transfers from the national oil fund to the budget in 2010 and introduced changes to it in 2012. This report assesses the role of fiscal rules for countercyclical economic management in Kazakhstan. It responds to government and World Bank demand to assess the following four topics: 1) assessing the cyclicality of the government’s economic policy stance over the last 10 years and identifying lessons from this experience; 2) exploring how different global economic scenarios affect key variables in the Kazakh economy; 3) assessing the expected impacts of alternative fiscal rules on key economic variables; and 4) reviewing the literature on countercyclical fiscal policy and its relevance for Kazakhstan. This report’s five chapters outline the advantages of Kazakhstan's current fiscal rule and its performance against other types of rules. Chapter 1 reviews the performance of the Kazakh economy over the last 10 years. Chapter 2 argues that fiscal rules can be simple and transparent. Chapter 3 presents the results of simulations of different global economic scenarios and the expected impacts on key variables in Kazakhstan. Chapter 4 uses the results of these simulations to test the performance of different types of fiscal rules. Chapter 5 responds to a government request to review the literature on the use of fiscal and monetary policy for countercyclical economic management.  Réduire