Person:
Skrok, Emilia

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Fiscal Policy
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
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Emilia Skrok is a program leader in the World Bank’s Macroeconomics, Fiscal Management, Governance, Poverty, and Equity Department. She joined the World Bank in 2005. Previously, she served as an economist on the Economic and Market Research Team at the Treasury Department of Bank PEKAO S.A., the largest private bank in Poland, and as a senior economist in the Department of Financial Policy, Analysis, and Statistics in Poland’s Ministry of Finance. She has also taught international comparative economics at the Warsaw School of Economics. Her research focuses on fiscal policy analysis, including tax and spending policies and fiscal institutions at both the national and subnational levels. She holds a PhD in Economics from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics.

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    Fiscal Rules and Economic Size in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-09-23) Blanco, Fernando; Saavedra, Pablo; Koehler-Geib, Friederike; Skrok, Emilia
    Following the collapse of commodity prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2014-15, many countries in the region were unable to cushion the impact of the shock in order to experience a more gradual adjustment, to a large extent because they had not built adequate fiscal buffers during the commodities’ windfall from 2010-14. Many LAC countries entered 2020 and the COVID-19 crisis in an even more difficult position, with rising debt and limited fiscal space to smooth the negative impacts of the pandemic and adequately support their economies. Fiscal policy in most LAC countries has been procyclical. Public expenditure and debt levels have expanded in good times and contracted in severe downswings due to insufficient fiscal buffers, making crises deeper. Fiscal rules represent a promising policy option for these and other economies. If well-designed and implemented, they can help build buffers during periods of strong economic performance that will be available during rainy days to smooth economic shocks. This book—which was prepared before the COVID-19 crisis—reviews the performance and implementation of different fiscal rules in the region and world. It provides analytical and practical criteria for policy makers for the design, establishment, and feasible implementation of fiscal rules based on each country's business cycle features, external characteristics, type of shocks faced, initial fiscal conditions, technical and institutional capacities, and political context. While establishing new fiscal rules would not help to attenuate the immediate effects of this pandemic crisis, higher debt levels in the aftermath of COVID-19 will demand rebuilding better and stronger institutional frameworks of fiscal policy in LAC and emerging economies globally. Having stronger fiscal mechanisms that include fiscal rules can help countries prepare for the next crisis and should be on the front burner for policy makers in coming years. The findings and lessons discussed apply to economies of different sizes, with some differences under certain scenarios in terms of the technical design and criteria needed for implementation. In this book, policy makers will find that fiscal rules, if tailored to country characteristics, can work and be an essential fiscal tool for larger and particularly smaller economies.
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    Fiscal Policy Issues in the Aging Societies
    (2015-03) Bogetic, Zeljko; Onder, Harun; Onal, Anil; Skrok, Emilia; Schwartz, Anita; Winkler, Hernan
    Aging may be one of the most far-reaching processes defining the economic, fiscal, and social changes societies are likely to experience over the next 40 years. The demographic consequences of aging will have a dramatic impact on labor markets, economic growth, social structures--and government budgets. These issues have gained urgency after the second largest global recession in the past 100 years. Based on a broad comparative analysis of countries that include the EU and non-EU European and Central Asian countries, as well as several case studies and model simulations, the paper seeks to provide broad answers--tailored in part to distinct groups of countries according to their aging-fiscal profiles--to major questions facing governments budgets in aging societies: What are the fiscal-aging profiles of Western European, emerging European, and Central Asian countries? In other words, how good or bad is their fiscal situation--"initial conditions"--in view of their emerging aging-related problems? What kind of public spending pressures are likely to emerge in the coming decades, and what will be their relative importance? How do countries compare in terms of the possible impacts of aging on growth and long-term debt sustainability? What can be learned from in-depth and comparative case studies of aging, fiscal sustainability, and fiscal reform? Are there good-practice examples--countries doing things right at the right time--that may offer lessons for the others? And, perhaps most important, given the need for long-term fiscal consolidation for many countries, what kind of revenue and expenditure policy agendas are likely to emerge to mitigate the effects of aging? A key policy conclusion is that countries should aim for early rather than delayed reforms dealing with long-term aging pressures. The urgency is accentuated by the debt situations and/or adverse debt and demographic dynamics in almost all countries but also by the evolving voter preferences. As societies age and voting preferences increasingly reflect the political will of the older population, it will become more difficult to enact the necessary reforms ensuring social and fiscal sustainability.
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    Sustainability of Pension Systems in the New EU member States and Croatia : Coping with Aging Challenges and Fiscal Pressures
    (Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008) KÄ…sek, Leszek; Laursen, Thomas; Skrok, Emilia
    This report concerns recent pension reforms in Europe. Over the last decade, pension reform has been a major issue on the political agenda across Europe. All European countries are profoundly affected by aging populations resulting from lower fertility and increased life expectancy. In order to make pension systems more sustainable in light of prospective demographic developments, and in some cases to address current financing problems, EU10+1countries have been reforming their pension systems since the mid-1990s. The reforms have combined measures to delay retirement, link benefits more closely to contributions, and diversify risk. Three major forces drive the ageing process: increasing life expectancy, low fertility rates, and finally the baby-boom generation reaching retirement age. All these factors, even in countries where the system is currently fiscally balanced, will produce a major financial challenge for pension systems over the coming decades when the number of pensioners will rapidly increase and the size of the working-age population diminish. This report conclude that some countries (in particular, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Romania) will need to do more to safeguard the long-term viability of their pension systems, and others face ongoing and future challenges in ensuring equitable pension systems and adequate living standards for all elderly people.