After narrowing modestly in 2013, the global scale of current account imbalances, and of excess imbalances, held steady in 2014. Over the last several years, while the country composition of imbalances has rotated somewhat, overall there has been little progress on reducing excess imbalances....

After narrowing in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and remaining broadly unchanged in recent years, global imbalances increased moderately in 2015, amid a reconfiguration of current accounts and exchange rates. Shifts in 2015 were driven primarily by the uneven strength of the...

Global current account imbalances were broadly unchanged in 2016, with minor shifts adding to the reconfiguration under way since 2013. The fall in commodity prices, uneven cyclical recoveries in systemic economies, and differences in policy responses contributed to the rotation of imbalances....

The IMF's Second Pilot External Sector Report presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2012-2013 H1. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide a coherent...

The IMF's third Pilot External Sector Report (ESR) presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2013 and early 2014. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide 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...

Anecdotal evidence relates corruption with high levels of military spending. This paper tests empirically whether such a relationship exists. The empirical analysis is based on data from four different sources for up to 120 countries in the period 1985–98. The association between military...

Rodriguez and Rodrik (2000) argue that the relation between openness and growth is still an open question. One of the main problems in the assessment of the effect is the endogeneity of the relation. In order to address this issue, this paper applies the identification through heteroskedasticity...