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In recent decades, the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) has experienced more frequent and severe conflicts than in any other region of the world, exacting a devastating human toll. The region now faces unprecedented challenges, including the emergence of violent non-state actors, significant destruction, and a refugee crisis bigger than any since World War II. This paper raises awareness of the economic costs of conflicts on the countries directly involved and on their neighbors. It argues that appropriate macroeconomic policies can help mitigate the impact of conflicts in the short term, and that fostering higher and more inclusive growth can help address some of the root causes of conflicts over the long term. The paper also highlights the crucial role of external partners, including the IMF, in helping MENA countries tackle these challenges.
The Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) countries are at an important juncture in their economic transition. Following significant economic progress during the 2000s, recent external shocks have revealed the underlying vulnerabilities of the current growth model. Lower commodity prices, weaker remittances, and slower growth in key trading partners reduced CCA growth, weakened external and fiscal balances, and raised public debt. the financial sector was also hit hard by large foreign exchange losses. while commodity prices have recovered somewhat since late 2014, to boost its economic potential, the region needs to find new growth drivers, diversify away from natural resources, remittances, and public spending, and generate much stronger private sector-led activity.
This paper develops new error assessment methods to evaluate the performance of debt sustainability analyses (DSAs) for low-income countries (LICs) from 2005-2015. We find some evidence of a bias towards optimism for public and external debt projections, which was most appreciable for LICs with the highest incomes, prospects for market access, and at ‘moderate’ risk of debt distress. This was often driven by overly-ambitious fiscal and/or growth forecasts, and projected ‘residuals’. When we control for unanticipated shocks, we find that biases remain evident, driven in part by optimism regarding government fiscal reaction functions and expected growth dividends from investment.
Does the proliferation of post-atrocity remedies over the past 25-plus years—the human rights movement, reparations and other justice schemes, and memorials and counter-memorials—suggest promising alternatives to retributive criminal proceedings? Or does it mean that very little so far is working? This collection of essays, written by scholars with ties to Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, and the United States, argues that a new post-atrocity framework is taking root. In search for a more reliably favorable post-atrocity succession, the volume’s contributors weigh the merits of practices circumventing the state, whose anemic performance has failed to manage large-s...
This paper examines how financial development affects the sources of growth—productivity and investment—using a sample of 145 countries for the period 1960-2011. We employ a range of econometric approaches, focusing on the CCA and MENA countries. The analysis looks beyond financial depth to capture the access, efficiency, stability, and openness dimensions of financial development. Yet even in this broad interpretation, financial development does not appear to be a magic bullet for economic growth. We cannot confirm earlier findings of an unambiguously positive relationship between financial development, investment, and productivity. The relationship is more complex. The influence of the different dimensions of financial development on the sources of growth varies across income levels and regions.
Contains original papers that examine various issues concerning the role, the structure and functioning of credit, currency and derivatives instruments and markets as they relate to financial crises. This title stresses the importance of the inter-linkages of these instruments and markets in promoting or hindering financial stability or crises.
In the 1970's, many countries were plagued by persistently high inflation rates, which were thought to cause a significant loss in economic efficiency. Since persistent inflation is considered to be ultimately the result of monetary policy, many countries in the 1990s sought institutional reforms to their central banks to prevent a return to the 1970s experience. A popular reform was to move from giving central banks multiple policy goals to a single mandate of price stability. The single mandate was accompanied by the introduction of an inflation target, in which central banks aim to keep inflation within a pre-defined numerical range. The logic behind these reforms was a belief among proponents that it would remove the political temptation to 'pump up' the economy in the short run at the expense of long-run price stability, and a belief that 'fine tuning' monetary policy in response to every change in economic conditions, was of little value. This book develops quantitative measurements to analyse the success of inflation targeting abroad by comparing both the performance of targeters to non-targeters and the performance of countries before and after targeting was adopted.
This volume describes the most salient changes faced by key Chinese industry sectors as defining components of global and domestic macroeconomic performance. Set within the context of the Global China 2049 initiative, which aims to transform the country into a fully advanced and developed nation, chapters focus specifically on industrial policies that are considered to be one of the main determinants of Chinese growth. Covering sectors such as healthcare, aerospace, microprocessors and other data driven industries, chapters highlight the pitfalls and anticipated successes of Chinese firms operating in the global competitive market. Importantly, the book fosters debate on how Chinese industri...
The increasing capital flows in the emerging markets and developed countries have raised various concerns worldwide. One main concern is the impact of the sharp decline of capital flows – so-called sudden stops – on financial markets and the stability of banking systems and the economy. The sudden stops and banking crises have been identified as the two main features of most financial crises, including the recent Asian Financial Crisis and Global Financial Crisis. However, how capital flows and banking crises are connected still remains unanswered. Most current studies on capital flows are empirical work, which faces various challenges. The challenges include how data has been collected ...
China is at a critical juncture in its economic transformation as it tries to rebalance what is generally seen as an exhausted growth model. A unifying theme across the reforms that will deliver this transformation is that it can no longer be achieved by raising the amount of physical investment and government direction of resource allocation. Instead China is building a new set of policy frameworks that will allow markets to function more effectively—not unfettered markets, but markets that work efficiently, in line with broad social and other policy goals, and in a sustainable way. Hence, China is now building a new soft infrastructure, that is, the institutional plumbing that underpins ...