Sound policies and favorable external conditions have led to a strong economic recovery, but important challenges lie ahead. Uruguay’s near-term economic prospects are generally favorable. The main short-term challenge is rising inflation in the wake of vigorous growth and capital...

The staff report for the 2006 Article IV Consultation on Botswana highlights economic developments and monetary and exchange rate policy. Botswana’s growth has been fueled by continued increases in diamond production; and real diamond output is projected to level off, and then decline...

Indonesia’ 2008 Article IV Consultation reports that Indonesia’s growth performance remains strong despite the deteriorating global environment. The economy remains vulnerable to shifts in investor sentiment, and volatility in the government bond market has increased. The new...

This report on the Russian Federation’s Article IV Consultation highlights Data Module and response by the authorities. Russia’s statistical system has made good progress in adopting international statistical methodologies in response to the need to capture in the statistics the...

This paper examines the current level of central bank independence (CBI) and transparency in a broad sample of countries using newly constructed measures, and looks at the evolution in both measures from an earlier time period. Increases in CBI have tended to occur in more democratic countries...

This paper examines Turkey’s 2004 Article IV Consultation and Eighth Review Under the Stand-By Arrangement and Request for Waiver of Nonobservance of Performance Criterion. Economic performance over the last three years has been impressive. For the medium term, the main challenge is to...

This Selected Issues paper examines the main factors explaining Ukraine’s growth performance so far, assesses whether the recent recovery is sustainable, and provides a quantitative analysis of long-term growth prospects. It finds that the recent recovery is not yet self-sustaining and...

This 2003 Article IV Consultation highlights that the macroeconomic developments in the Russian Federation remained generally strong, with a third consecutive year of considerable GDP growth, fiscal surplus, and large current account surplus. The economy continues to benefit from the earlier...

In the past decades, much work has been geared toward solving the problem of time inconsistency in monetary policy and analyzing the coordination problem between fiscal and monetary policy. This paper provides a review of the theoretical background to these theories, while also focusing on their...

Upon entry into the European Union, countries become members of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), with a derogation from adopting the euro as their currency (that is, each country joining the EU commits to replace its national currency with the euro, but can choose when to request...