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Asia and Pacific > Maldives

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Cover IMF Working Papers
Designing Fiscal Redistribution: The Role of Universal and Targeted Transfers
Mr. David Coady
and
Nghia-Piotr Le
There is a growing debate on the relative merits of universal and targeted social assistance transfers in achieving income redistribution objectives. While the benefits of targeting are clear, i.e., a larger poverty impact for a given transfer budget or lower fiscal cost for a given poverty impact, in practice targeting also comes with various costs, including incentive, administrative, social and political costs. The appropriate balance between targeted and universal transfers will therefore depend on how countries decide to trade-off these costs and benefits as well as on the potential for redistribution through taxes. This paper discusses the trade-offs that arise in different country contexts and the potential for strengthening fiscal redistribution in advanced and developing countries, including through expanding transfer coverage and progressive tax financing.
Keywords:
WP; income; cost; earned income; taxation framework; consumption taxation; transfer program; income tax schedule; efficiency cost; poverty impact; redistribution objective; means testing; income share; public spending; income redistribution objective; progressive tax; poverty line; Personal income; Income tax systems; Fiscal redistribution; Income inequality; Middle East; North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Global; East Africa; transfers; taxes; targeted; universal; income transfer
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Maldives: Technical Assistance Report-Reform Options to Strengthen Tax Policy
International Monetary Fund. Fiscal Affairs Dept.
This report reviews tax policy in the Maldives and identifies reform options to support efficiency, equity, and revenue. The absence of a broad-based personal income tax (PIT) generates revenue leakages and significantly diminishes the role of tax policy in income redistribution. A modern tax design requires a holistic view of the taxation of different sources of income and different legal forms of taxpayers to maintain tax neutrality, to the extent possible, while preserving some degrees of progressivity, simplicity, and administrability. Moreover, updating the tax system to cope with recent international developments is vital to safeguard revenues. While strengthening the goods and services tax (GST) can raise revenues in the short- to medium-term, a property tax is an important option for the long-term. The diagram below demonstrates reform priorities, as identified in this report, to modernize tax policy in the Maldives.
Keywords:
ISCR; CR; tax treatment; progressive tax; goods and services tax; property tax; tax rate; tax treaty; zero rating; flat tax; stamp duty; tax revenue; tax law; Double taxation; Personal income; Value-added tax; Income and capital gains taxes; Global
Cover Policy Papers
Eligibility to Use the Fund's Facilities for Concessional Financing, 2015
International Monetary Fund
The review of PRGT eligibility continues to be guided by the principles of maintaining a transparent, rules-based, and parsimonious framework—ensuring uniformity of treatment across members in similar situations while taking appropriate account of country-specific circumstances. The graduation policy seeks to maintain broad alignment with the World Bank’s IDA graduation practices, while also remaining consistent with the principle of ensuring the self-sustainability of the PRGT’s lending capacity over time. The paper concludes that the existing framework remains broadly appropriate, but could be enhanced in a few areas, including: Making use of additional data sources, namely the IMF BEL database, in assessing that a country has durable and substantial market access, supplementing the current reliance on the World Bank’s IDS database that is produced with a significant lag; Sharpening the specification of circumstances under which the presence of serious short-term vulnerabilities would justify non-graduation of a country that meets the income graduation criterion. This would entail limiting the application of the serious short-term vulnerabilities criterion for countries that exceed the applicable income graduation threshold by 50 percent or more.
Keywords:
PP; market; market access; income; debt; country; eligibility framework; graduation criterion; PRGT eligibility; market financing; debt vulnerability; Personal income; Debt sustainability; Debt sustainability analysis; International capital markets; Global; West Africa
Cover IMF Working Papers
Assessing Countries’ Financial Inclusion Standing - A New Composite Index
Mr. Alexander Massara
and
André Mialou
This paper leverages the IMF’s Financial Access Survey (FAS) database to construct a new composite index of financial inclusion. The topic of financial inclusion has gathered significant attention in recent years. Various initiatives have been undertaken by central banks both in advanced and developing countries to promote financial inclusion. The issue has also attracted increasing interest from the international community with the G-20, IMF, and World Bank Group assuming an active role in developing and collecting financial inclusion data and promoting best practices to improve financial inclusion. There is general recognition among policy makers that financial inclusion plays a significant role in sustaining employment, economic growth, and financial stability. Nonetheless, the issue of its robust measurement is still outstanding. The new composite index uses factor analysis to derive a weighting methodology whose absence has been the most persistent of the criticisms of previous indices. Countries are then ranked based on the new composite index, providing an additional analytical tool which could be used for surveillance and policy purposes on a regular basis.
Keywords:
WP; income group; factor analysis; Financial inclusion; access and usage of financial services; index; borrowers variable; a number of variable; outreach variable; cross-dimension composite index; scale invariance; household depositor; composite index value; usage variable; normalized variable; geometric mean; Public expenditure review; Personal income; Commercial banks; Global
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Sri Lanka: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund
This paper attempts to assess the impact of the oil shock on South Asian economies, including Sri Lanka, as well as policy responses to deal with the shock, and the real income loss for low-income households if fuel subsidies were fully removed. The most important impact has been on the balance of payments followed by the results of poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) conducted for Sri Lanka. Finally, the paper explores to what extent Sri Lanka’s large receipts of worker remittances serve as a hedge against shocks.
Keywords:
ISCR; CR; price; remittance; Rs.; GDP; remittance receipt; remittance flow; system database; price pass-through; nonfuel commodity price; Personal income; Remittances; Energy subsidies; Oil prices; Inflation; South Asia; Asia and Pacific; Global