This report updates the macroeconomic assessment of the impact of global food and fuel price increases provided in the IMF June 2008 Board paper: Food and Fuel Prices-Recent Developments, Macroeconomic Impact, and Policy Response. Food and oil prices peaked in early summer-in particular, oil...

This paper reviews economic developments in Barbados during the 1990s. Economic activity declined during 1990-92 but began to recover in 1993. The recovery started slowly in 1993, but picked up in 1994, and real GDP grew by 3.8 percent in that year. Adverse weather in 1994 led to a drop in sugar...

The turn of the century was marked by some significant and promising events for world development. The Millennium Declaration - signed by 189 countries in September 2000 - led to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, which set clear targets for eradicating poverty and other sources...

The global financial crisis, the most severe since the great depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. The financial crisis originated in the developed world, but it has spread quickly and inexorably to the developing world, sparing no country. Increasingly it appears...

A Development Emergency: the title of this year's Global Monitoring Report, the sixth in an annual series, could not be more apt. The global economic crisis, the most severe since the Great Depression, is rapidly turning into a human and development crisis. No region is immune. The poor...

Although the impact of the global crisis has been severe, real per capita GDP growth stayed positive in two-thirds of low-income countries (LICs), unlike in previous global downturns, and in contrast to richer countries. Emerging from the Global Crisis explores how LICS have coped with the...

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...