4 mechanism based on rules); Vagliasindi recommended strengthened social safety nets, targeted subsidies, one‐off compensatory measures, and broader sectoral reforms. More recent reform steps are briefly summarized in IEA (2015), which describes drivers for subsidy reforms—budgetary pressure, low international energy prices, peer pressure, policy advice and technical assistance, and loan conditionality—without detailed analysis of factors contributing to sustainability of reforms.

Regions and countries covered in recent publications analyzing fossil fuel subsidy reforms in the developing world include the Gulf Cooperation Council, with specific analysis of potential effects on inflation and near‐term and long‐term growth (IMF 2015l); Bangladesh (Mujeri, Chowdhury, and Siban Shahana 2014), with suggested priority actions; the Arab Republic of Egypt, with a focus on the July 2014 price increases (James 2015); and Peru (APEC 2015), as part of the peer review process for the Asia‐ Pacific Economic Corporation (APEC).

This paper takes more recent data—covering reform measures through the end of 2015—and examines fossil fuel subsidies in developing countries, where price subsidies persist. For this reason, it focuses largely on pricing policies. Covering the period until the end of 2015 enables assessment of reform measures announced at the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015, and reporting of new reform measures announced at the end of 2015, as governments put forward the 2016 budget proposals. The paper asks the following questions:

- Has the recent fall in world oil and natural gas prices led to more pricing reforms?

- Have reform announcements been followed by consistent implementation?

- Are governments addressing the pitfalls of price controls and how?

- Are governments with subsidies behaving differently from the way they did in 2008–2009, when the world oil price fell similarly?

- What characterizes policies and implementation that seem to sustain reform efforts?

This paper updates a previous publication that traced the evolution of pricing policies for petroleum products from 2009 to 2013 (Kojima 2013a), and expands the scope to include natural gas. Because several countries have taken advantage of low world oil prices to raise taxes and levies on fuels, fuel tax increases are also covered. Subsidies in the power sector are common and fossil fuels may be sources of power generation; as such subsidies in the power sector are also discussed to the extent applicable.<sup>3</sup> The paper uses publicly available information—including government price surveys and price announcements, laws, regulations, decrees, decisions, press releases, data on government websites, annual reports of ministries and central banks, and reports issued by oil companies—to answer the first four questions, with preference given to government sources wherever they are available. As such, the degree of detail available is an indication of the transparency of pricing and subsidy policies. At the same

> 3 One difficulty is attribution. Subsidies in the power sector arise for a number of reasons, of which not fully covering fuel costs is only one. If subsidies are needed because aggregate losses (technical, commercial, collection) are far in excess of any reasonable benchmark, labeling the subsidies as fossil fuel subsidies may not be appropriate. If, on the other hand, subsidies have arisen primarily because of much higher fuel purchase costs—for example, having to rely far more on fuel oil and diesel because of a drought‐induced drop in hydropower generation or because of gas supply interruptions—it would be reasonable to classify such subsidies as fossil fuel subsidies.