Active economic policies by developing countries’ governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the...

The magnitude of the public liabilities incurred as a result of the unprecedented government action in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the consequences of exiting from the projected high debt scenario, have become a major source of concern about a future sovereign debt crisis....

Sovereign wealth funds represent a large and growing pool of savings. An increasing number of these funds are owned by natural resource-exporting countries and have a variety of objectives, including intergenerational equity and macroeconomic stabilization. Traditionally, these funds have...

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending on the quality of economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the cumulative number of conditions...