Tax or debt financing of a given rate of government expenditures would, according to the now well-known Ricardian Equivalence proposition, have equivalent effects on aggregate demand. Among the reasons for a deviation from the equivalence is the possibility that the government and the private...

The rapid recovery in many low-income countries (LICs) following the global crisis has been sustained in 2012. Softening commodity prices have led to moderating inflation pressures in most LICs. However, progress in rebuilding policy buffers has halted over the past two years, despite continued...

An assessment of vulnerabilities and risks in LICs remains important both for LICs themselves and for the international community. There are currently 74 LICs, eligible for concessional financing from the Fund. This group of countries has a total population of about 1.3 billion, with an average...

This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on...

In recent years, the appropriate level and structure of interest tates have come to be seen as major issues in connection with stabilization programs undertaken by members. These issues arise from consideration both on the demand side, as interest rates affect the magnitude of aggregate demand,...

This paper was originally prepared for a seminar of the Executive Board of the Fund. In the seminar, Executive Directors expressed a broad range of views with regard to both the adequacy of the Fund's approach to financial programming and the validity of the analysis presented in this paper

This paper focuses on principles and various aspects of debt reduction and economic activity. The paper analyzes the effect of debt and debt-service reduction on the contractual and market values of a country's debt and also describes the IMF staff's preliminary attempts to describe and quantify...