The coronavirus crisis has stiffened debt and development-related headwinds that had become strong even before 2020. Sustaining development while maintaining debt sustainability has been made harder by the protracted effects of the pandemic on public finances, earnings and employment, and human...

The spectacular growth of many economies in East Asia over the past 30years has impressed the economics profession, which often refers to thesuccess of the so-called Four Tigers of the region (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan Province of China) as ""miraculous."" This papercritically...

Enhancing public and private investment, but also ensuring that this translates into higher growth and employment, have long been key policy challenges in Arab countries. Reflecting an improvement in policies and global conditions, investment rates in Arab countries have increased over the past...

In recent months, a number of Directors have expressed support in the Executive Board for a further extension of the temporary exceptional interest waiver on concessional lending. An extension would send a signal of the Fund's continued support for Low-Income Countries at a time when the global...

This paper constructs and analyzes an optimizing model of a highly-indebted small open economy. An important innovation in the model is the incorporation of sovereign risk through the specification of an upward-sloping foreign debt supply function. The model is used to examine the interaction...

This paper formulates a simple aggregate growth model that is capable of assessing the impact of macroeconomic policies on the long-term performance of a developing country. The model emphasizes expenditures on human capital and the dynamics of external debt, and yields empirically testable...

Islam proposes the replacement of an interest-based financial system with one which operates on the basis of risk and profit sharing. Using a general equilibrium model, this paper investigates some open-economy implications of the adoption of Islamic banking for growth and stabilization of the...