The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper examines the generation of financial crises in developing economies and shows that the microeconomic structure of the financial sector is a crucial factor in creating the conditions for a crisis. Structural problems of the financial system in developing countries, including implicit...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the income dispersion and comovement in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union region. It finds that incomes are diverging, with the Leeward Islands converging to a higher income level than the Windward Islands. The paper examines the macroeconomic impact of...

This paper examines the macroeconomic impact of tariffs. Existing theoretical models do not provide clear-cut predictions concerning the co-movement between unilateral tariff changes and a set of macroeconomic variables consisting of the real exchange rate, the trade balance, and the level of...

This paper reviews recent analytical and empirical research on the determination of employment, to provide a framework for evaluating the merits of alternative policies to cope with unemployment. Particular emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of employment and wage determination described in...

The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) countries’ economies are heavily dependent on the United States for foreign direct investment, mainly in the tourism sector. The Selected Issues paper discusses economic development and policies of the ECCU. About one-third of the stayover tourists...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes macroeconomic fluctuations in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper describes data, along with the estimation technique used to ensure stationarity of the data. The empirical regularities of macroeconomic fluctuations in the ECCU are...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks to an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses the ""quantity"", ""international comovement"",...