Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the...
Russia entered the global crisis with strong fiscal position, low public debt, and large fiscal and monetary reserves, which helped it cushion the crisis shocks. But the rise in the non-oil fiscal deficit...
This case study of fiscal sustainability in Turkey after the crisis in 2001 reviews and extends quantitative approaches to fiscal sustainability analysis and brings them together in a user-friendly tool...
This issue includes the following: Decentralizing Eligibility for a Federal Antipoverty Program: a case study for China, by Martin Ravallion; mental health pattern and consequences: results from survey...
This book is a collection of essays that seeks to answer three interrelated sets of questions about Africa's recent growth recovery. The first set of essays addresses questions about the drivers and durability...
Nigeria's oil boom has not brought an end to perennial stagnation in the non-oil economy. Is this the unavoidable consequence of the resource boom or have misguided policies contributed? This paper indicates...
Fiscal sustainability analysis (FSA) is an important component of macroeconomic analysis. The authors review various quantitative approaches to FSA with a major objective to bring these approaches together...
Fiscal sustainability analysis (FSA) is an important component of macroeconomic analysis for many developing countries. To further enhance understanding of fiscal policy and the constraints faced by policymakers...
Interest rates fell sharply after Mexico's Brady deal, and private investment and growth recovered. The authors show that the main benefit of debt relief was not to lower expected payments but to reduce...
Enterprise reform is emerging as the core economic problem in Eastern Europe. As privatization has been delayed, a new problem has emerged, largely unanticipated by outside advisers: It is probably possible...
Measuring the independence of central banks and its effect on policy outcomes. On the transmission of world agricultural prices. How small enterprises in Ghana have responded to adjustment. The dynamics...
Setting the price of maize in rural Mexico above the world price is inefficient and likely to have negative distributional effects because many subsistence producers, and all landless workers, are net...
Policy-makers in developing countries who try to reduce external debt are engaged in a complicated balancing act. Domestic spending programs could be curtailed to free up funds for the repayment of debt...
Should countries such as Poland or the USSR move toward more flexible prices gradually or in a "big bang?" Why is it that governments committed to eventual price flexibility so often seem to be unable...
This paper derived closed form solutions for the pricing of options on average prices and recapture clauses. On this basis, the values of recapture clauses in the Mexico and Venezuela agreements under...
Rapid trade liberalization is often followed by a surge of imports and a deterioration in the current account. The macroeconomic counterpart of this is a decline in private savings. This paper discusses...
The subject of this paper is the agreement reached on July 23, 1989 which offered commercial creditors the choice to exchange old debt instruments for new instruments involving debt relief, but partially...
Recent inflationary experience in countries like Israel, Argentina and Brazil cannot be explained using traditional views on the relation between macroeconomic policy and inflation. Keynesian views cannot...
External debt, inflation, and the public sector: toward fiscal policy for sustainable growth. Black market premia, exchange rate unification, and inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Indexation and inflationary...
Which tradeoffs are involved in formulating an external debt strategy? Should expenditure be cut to improve the current account, or will this reduce future output growth, thus undermining the benefits...