This paper analyzes the determinants of growth in 25 transition economies during 1990–97. The paper’s main finding is that macroeconomic stabilization, structural reform, and reduction of government expenditures are key to achieving sustainable growth. Although the initial effect of reforms...

The paper describes a global model consisting of several industrial and developing country blocks built to analyze alternative economic policies in a medium-term context. The model, which has been used to construct medium-term scenarios for the World Economic Outlook, consists of aggregate...

This paper develops a simple model for measuring potential output that uses data on inflation, unemployment, and capacity utilization. We apply the model to 10 countries, in addition to the United States and the euro area. While there is a substantial amount of uncertainty around our estimates,...

This paper presents three empirical approaches to forecasting inflation in Pakistan. The preferred approach is a leading indicators model in which broad money growth and private sector credit growth help forecast inflation. A univariate approach also yields reasonable forecasts, but seems less...

This paper seeks to advance the discussion of monetary policy strategies in several ways. One involves a comparison of targets for nominal GNP and the price level, with emphasis on specificational robustness and implications for output variability. A second pertains to various “indicator”...

This paper examines the dynamics of the foreign exchange market. The first half addresses a number of key questions regarding the forecasts of future exchange rates made by market participants, by means of updated estimates using survey data. Here we follow most of the theoretical and empirical...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

This Selected Issues paper on Nigeria highlights challenges faced by the country in building on the achievements of 2004. The authorities will have to maintain macroeconomic stability while implementing ambitious structural reforms aimed at reducing the costs of doing business in Nigeria and...

Like most Sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya’s economic growth appears to have been primarily driven by factor accumulation. The Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix for Kenya examines economic developments and policies. During the last two decades, Kenya has been plagued by...

This Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes—Data Module provides an assessment of Israel’s macroeconomic statistics against the Special Data Dissemination Standard complemented by an assessment of data quality based on the IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework,...