This Selected Issues paper on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) underlies key features of business cycles. To obtain new measures of classical and growth cycles, simple rules were applied to date turning points in the classical business cycle, and a recently developed frequency domain...

This paper documents the phenomenon of underpricing initial public offerings (IPOs) for 47 firms that went public between 2001 and 2006 in the equity markets of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The average initial abnormal returns of 290 percent exceed those found in the...

Pakistan undertook major financial sector reforms starting in the late 1980s. The effects of these reforms on the profitability and cost and revenue efficiency of the banking sector are evaluated. The revenue performance of all banks, and especially the privatized banks, improved significantly,...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

This paper describes the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) and systemic CCA to the top four commercial banks in Sweden. The balance sheet stress tests for four major banks were complemented with tests based on the CCA framework, a risk-adjusted balance sheet relating bank asset...

This Selected Issues paper for Chile describes the postcrisis recovery experience. The recovery from the 2008–2009 global crisis has been markedly different both among advanced and emerging economies. The steady improvement in the labor wedge-distortions related to the consumption leisure...

This Selected Issues paper reviews the extent to which growth in Ethiopia has translated into higher living standards. A key feature of the economic strategy has been an explicit commitment to poverty reduction and structural transformation. This is underpinned by the vision of a...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the key features of the Japanese business cycle, and investigates whether the current recovery differs from past recoveries. In particular, this paper poses the following questions: what are the main characteristics of Japanese business cycles since 1980, and...

This 2004 Article IV Consultation highlights that with growth proceeding at a steady pace of 2.6 percent during 2004, the Spanish economy has weathered the slowdown in the European Union relatively well. The external current account is estimated to have widened to some 4¼ percent of GDP in...