Small developing states are disproportionately vulnerable to natural disasters. On average, the annual cost of disasters for small states is nearly 2 percent of GDP-more than four times that for larger countries. This reflects a higher frequency of disasters, adjusted for land area, as well as...

Inflation-forecast targeting is state of the art for monetary policy. This book explores first principles, including managing short-term policy trade-offs. The book also outlines efficient operational procedures and reviews the experiences of Canada, the Czech Republic, and India. The analysis...

The consumer price index (CPI) measures the rate at which the prices of consumer goods and services are changing over time. It is a key statistic for economic and social policymaking and has substantial and wide-ranging implications for governments, businesses, and households. This important and...

Based on cross-country data for up to 78 countries, this paper shows that fiscal decentralization-the assignment of expenditure and revenue mobilization functions to subnational levels of government-is associated with various indicators of governance, such as corruption, rule of law, and...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

Anecdotal evidence relates corruption with high levels of military spending. This paper tests empirically whether such a relationship exists. The empirical analysis is based on data from four different sources for up to 120 countries in the period 1985–98. The association between military...