Accommodative monetary policies in advanced economies have spurred increased capital inflows into emerging markets since the global financial crisis. Starting in May 2013, when the Federal Reserve publicly discussed its plans for tapering unconventional monetary policies, these emerging markets...

This paper provides estimates of potential output growth in post-apartheid South Africa using both time trend techniques and a production function approach which indicates a potential growth rate of around 3 percent. The implied output gap provides statistically significant information for...

This paper examines two important issues for a small high-inflation open economy with trade controls where the government implements an exchange-rate based stabilization program: first, the extent to which the degree of openness of the economy influences the probability of success of the...

This paper surveys the literature on sovereign debt that deals with the issues of a country’s ability-to-pay, its willingness-to-pay, and the policy responses to the debt crisis of the 1980s. The existence of an ability-to-pay problem suggests a need for debt reduction, but plans for debt...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the impact of economic growth in the United States on growth in other countries. Using panel data estimation, the paper finds a significant positive impact of U.S. growth on growth in the rest of the world, especially developing countries, during...

The rapid aging of China's population over the next few decades makes it important for a new pension system with broad and adequate coverage to be put in place quickly. Pension reforms, first initiated in 1997, have become bogged down in difficulties over dealing with the "legacy costs"...

The transparency of monetary policy in South Africa has increased substantially since the end of the 1990s; but little empirical work has been done to examine the economic benefits of the increased transparency. This paper shows that, in recent years, South African private sector forecasters...

This paper quantifies the economic impact of changes in U.S. monetary policy on emerging market countries. We explore empirically how country risk, as proxied by sovereign bond spreads, is influenced by U.S. monetary policy, country-specific fundamentals, and conditions in global capital...