Uruguay has experienced a remarkable recovery since the 2002 crisis, supported by sound policies and favorable external conditions. With the framework put in place in 2002, Uruguay abandoned an exchange rate peg in favor of a free float, adoped a monetary regime initially based on money targets,...

Analyzing macroeconomic impacts of oil price changes requires first to investigate different sources of these changes and their distinct effects. Kilian (2009) analyzes the effects of an oil supply shock, an aggregate demand shock, and a precautionary oil demand shock. The paper's aim is to...

This Selected Issues paper on Denmark underlies estimates of inefficiencies in the goods and labor markets. The IMF’s new macroeconomic model, the global economic model (GEM), has been used to provide estimates of the impact of successfully implementing the European Council’s...

Over the past two years, the IMF staff has been developing a new multicountry macroeconomic model called the Global Economy Model (GEM). This paper explains why such a model is needed, how GEM differs from its predecessor model, and how the new features of the model can improve the IMF’s...

Using a panel of firm-level data, this paper examines the effects of India's trade reforms in the early 1990s on firm productivity in the manufacturing sector, focusing on the interaction between this policy shock and firm and environment characteristics. The rapid and comprehensive tariff...

This paper analyzes whether uniform tariffs give rise to the highest welfare compared with tariffs that either escalate or de-escalate along the value chain of production. We show that countries may be better off with de-escalating tariffs where tariff rates are higher on intermediate inputs and...

We evaluate empirically the impact of the dramatic 1991 trade liberalization in India on the industry wage structure. The empirical strategy uses variation in industry wage premiums and trade policy across industries and over time. In contrast to earlier studies on developing countries, we find...

Swiss growth performance in the past quarter century has been mediocre. The paper finds that conditional income convergence contributes significantly to slow growth and the poor performance of the domestically oriented sectors has been a drag on growth. However, slow growth is not inescapable....

Despite the appreciation of the exchange rate, the eight Central and Eastern European countries (the CEE-8) that entered the European Union in May 2004 have achieved a decade of impressive export growth, expanding significantly their shares of world markets. Does this mean that the real exchange...

India's exports nearly tripled in the 1990s. Decomposing export growth shows that it has been driven by incumbent firms rather than the entry of new firms. By using a new panel on Indian firms and estimating a dynamic discrete-choice model of the firm's decision to export, we find evidence that...