This paper explores the role of foreign aid and remittance inflows in the mitigation of the effects of food price shocks. Using a large sample of developing countries and mobilising dynamic panel data specifications, the econometric results yield two important findings. First, remittance and aid...

This note discusses the implications of the price shocks for the balance of payments of low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The response by bilateral donors and multilateral institutions will, in practice, need to be country-specific. To this end, the note identifies a list of 18...

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...

In this paper, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have drawn together available research findings on the benefits of trade liberalization as well as on the obstacles to trade-oriented development

Open market operations are the major instruments of monetary control in industrial countries and are becoming important in developing countriesand countries in transition. This paper shows how open market operationsare related to other monetary instruments, discusses the role of the market and...

This paper reviews past trends in public pension spending and provides projections for 27 advanced and 25 emerging economies over 2011-2050. In constructing these projections, the paper incorporates the impact of recent pension reforms and highlights the key assumptions underlying these...

The focus of the paper is on five key financial stability issues in Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), which have been selected on the basis of their degree of materiality for a reasonably broad range of EMDEs; their implications for regulatory, supervisory or other financial...

Investigates the macroeconomic challenges for low-income countries created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, and then applies this framework to the experience of five relatively well-governed countries that...