Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

The paper discusses options available to tax mineral extraction projects particularly in developing countries. A desirable government share of the economic rent generated from mineral extraction can be achieved through different tax and non-tax instruments. This gives some room to design a...

We investigate the impact of remittances on public debt sustainability and detail how the traditional debt-to-GDP ratio can be modified to create a more accurate representation of debt sustainability for a country that receives significant remittance inflows. The main result is that inclusion of...

Over the past decades, workers' remittances have grown to become one of the largest sources of financial flows to developing countries, often dwarfing other widely-studied sources such as private capital and official aid flows. While it is undeniable that remittances have poverty-alleviating and...

Exchange rate reforms in developing countries have often aimed at floating the exchange rate in an attempt to unify the official and parallel markets for foreign exchange. This paper examines the anticipatory dynamics associated with such reforms. The analysis shows that if the future unified...