A Fiscal Policy Dashboard for Low-Income Economies

We construct a fiscal policy dashboard to provide a snapshot of the fiscal system of a country, focusing on macro-sustainability, revenue mobilization, spending composition, and redistributive effects. The dashboard is designed to suit low-income economies, taking into account specificities of their fiscal challenges as well as the relative scarcity of data. Benchmarks are constructed to assess the level of a nation’s indicators in relation to those observed in comparable countries. As a tool for analyzing and comparing national tax systems, such a dashboard is especially useful for governments, international organizations, and civil society organizations operating in low-income economies. To illustrate the methodology, we construct the dashboard for three countries—Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Cambodia—and provide examples of how the dashboard could be exploited by different users.