There are few areas of economic policy-making in which the returns to good decisions are so high-and the punishment of bad decisions so cruel-as in the management of natural resource wealth. Rich endowments of oil, gas and minerals have set some countries on courses of sustained and robust...

The Iranian economy recovered on the strength of international oil prices, strong rebound in agricultural sector, and rapid credit expansion. Inflation was contained while fiscal and external positions improved. Key policy priorities are to maintain short-term macroeconomic stability, transition...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

This paper describes the result and the methodology of updating nominal and real effective exchange rate weights on the basis of trade data over 1999-2001. The underlying framework is an updated version of the IMF''s current effective exchange rate calculation, which uses weights largely based...