This Selected Issues Paper on Iran reviews that monetary factors are the main determinants of inflation in the country. Government spending out of oil revenues leads to large liquidity injections that the central bank accommodates owing to its efforts to prevent a significant nominal...

Niger’s overall macroeconomic statistics is a picture of contrasts. Establishing the National Statistical Institute (INS) and giving it a clear and precise mandate is a step in the right direction. Accuracy and reliability suffer from the weakness of data sources, notably in national...

The report gives details of the economic analysis for the implementation of Chile's inflation targeting framework. It reviews the current state of liquidity in the Chilean fixed-income markets and developments and impediments to the supply of corporate bonds to the market. The paper considers a...

This Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC)—data module—provides an assessment of Moldova’s macroeconomic statistics against the recommendations of the General Data Dissemination System (GDDS) complemented by an assessment of data quality based on the...

This Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes—Data Module provides an assessment of Israel’s macroeconomic statistics against the Special Data Dissemination Standard complemented by an assessment of data quality based on the IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework,...

This paper studies the factors that have influenced countries' participation in IMF drawing programs. IMF drawing programs are defined as the period of a Stand-By Arrangement or an Extended Fund Facilities program during which a country borrows from the Fund. Since this definition excludes...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

We revisit the dramatic failure of monetary models in explaining exchange rate movements. Using the information content from 98 countries, we find strong evidence for cointegration between nominal exchange rates and monetary fundamentals. We also find fundamentalsbased models very successful in...

In recent years there has been substantial theoretical and empirical work on the role that financial markets play in fostering economic growth and development. This paper provides a selective review of the literature, as well as new empirical evidence on the relationship between financial...

This is the first of a series of papers that are being written as part of a project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In this paper, we estimate a small...