In March 2009, the Fund established a new Framework Administered Account to administer external financial resources for selected Fund activities (the 'SFA Instrument'). The financing of activities under the terms of the SFA Instrument is implemented through the establishment and operation of a...

In a previous assessment, it was concluded that the British Virgin Islands (BVI) regulatory system governing securities markets functioned well overall, but required improvement in certain areas. Those areas are implemented with regulatory code, Securities and Investment Business Act (SIBA),...

This paper discusses reasons functions of the IMF, why it needs more resources, and how these resources will be used. The IMF provides a forum for cooperation, having as its objective the balanced expansion of international trade in order to stimulate employment and improve economic conditions...

This Selected Issues paper assesses the fiscal risk impact of various events in Tonga and describes the challenges implied for fiscal management. The paper discusses that the Tongan government has made various efforts to limit the budgetary implications of the recent economic and political...

This paper examines the IMF's concepts of convertibility and gives some impression of their purposes. The central concept of convertibility in the Articles is the convertibility of Article VIII, Sections 2, 3, and 4. Under it, the basic rule is that members must avoid restrictions on the making...

Forward-looking behavior on the part of the monetary authority leads least squares estimates to understate the true growth consequences of monetary policy interventions. We present instrumental variables estimates of the impact of interest rates on real output growth for several European...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

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...

In the literature on exports and investment, most productive firms are seen to invest abroad. In the Helpman et al. (2004) model, costs of transportation play a critical role in the decision about whether to serve foreign customers by exporting, or by producing abroad. We consider the case of...