This paper analyzes the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements on emerging market economies since end-2008, the period coinciding with the use of unconventional policy measures. Monetary policy surprises are measured by changes in two-year Treasury yields in short windows of...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the credibility of economic policy making in Argentina (or lack thereof) has impacted the volatility of economic performance. To establish the link, a historical review of economic policy making and economic outcomes over the quarter century is presented,...

The traditional theory of fiscal federalism assigns the role of macroeconomic stabilization to the federal government. In addition to this long-standing theoretical result, there is empirical observation that federal governments in developing countries typically have cheaper and more stable...

This paper analyzes the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements on emerging market economies since end-2008, the period coinciding with the use of unconventional policy measures. Monetary policy surprises are measured by changes in two-year Treasury yields in short windows of...

One of the two goals of the World Bank Group's new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this...

In recent years, the term "middle-income trap" has entered common parlance in the development policy community. The term itself often has not been precisely defined in the incipient literature. This paper discusses in more detail definitional issues on the so-called middle-income trap. The paper...