Capital flows can deliver substantial benefits for countries, but also have the potential to contribute to a buildup of systemic financial risk. Benefits, such as enhanced investment and consumption smoothing, tend to be greater for countries whose financial and institutional development enables...

The paper examines the case for contingent financial instruments for low-income countries (LICs), from both the market and official sector. These include commodity price hedging instruments, contingent debt instruments (commodity-linked bonds, deferred repayment loans), and natural disaster...

This paper, introduces the analytical framework for a Vulnerability Exercise for Low-Income Countries (VE-LIC). The envisaged exercise will strive to identify vulnerabilities and emerging risks that arise from changes in the external environment in a consistent manner across countries and across...

Hong Kong SAR''s government faces the dual challenges of volatile revenue and medium term spending pressures arising from a rapidly aging population. Age-related spending pressures raise long-run sustainability concerns, while revenue volatility creates risks to service provision, possibly...

This paper presents a neoclassical model that explains the observed empirical relationship between government spending and world commodity supplies and the real exchange rate and real commodity prices. It is shown that fiscal expansion and increasing world commodity supplies simultaneously lead...

This paper studies the impact of the level and volatility of the commodity terms of trade on economic growth, as well as on the three main growth channels: total factor productivity, physical capital accumulation, and human capital acquisition. We use the standard system GMM approach as well as...

Over the past decade, Indonesia has developed into an important regional and global economy, as well as an active participant in the G20. The chapters in this book document the substantial improvements in the quality of macroeconomic policy that Indonesia has achieved, while also clearly laying...

This paper examines the impact of trade costs on real exchange rate volatility. We incorporate a multi-country Ricardian model of trade, based on the work of Eaton and Kortum (2002), into a macroeconomic model to show how bilateral real exchange rate volatility depends on relative technological...