Measuring The Informal Economy In Latin America And The Caribbean

This paper proposes a framework for public debt sustainability analysis (DSA) that is complementary to that generally used by IFIs. The DSA in this paper has three components: (i) an integrated and consistent accounting framework for the Consolidated Public Sector (CPS); (ii) the estimation of an appropriate, and country-specific debt threshold, following the approach proposed by Reinhart, Rogoff and Savastano (2003); and (iii) a method for the calculation of the CPS primary balance to achieve the desired debt targets, without resorting to ad-hoc assumptions for the values of the macroeconomic variables during the planning horizon, in the spirit of Garcia and Rigobon (2004) and Celasun, Debrun and Ostry (2006).