This Joint Staff Advisory Note provides comments and advice on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), plans for its implementation, and priorities for strengthening it, including through annual progress reports (APRs) for Burundi. The PRSP highlights that Burundi’s weak...

This paper shows that aggregate investment expenditure shares on tradable and nontradable goods are very similar across countries and regions. Furthermore, the two expenditure shares have remained close to constant over time, with the average expenditure share on nontradables varying between...

This Joint Staff Assessment assesses the Economic Growth Support and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EGSPRS), which is the first full poverty reduction strategy paper (PRSP) prepared by the government of Mongolia. The EGSPRS builds on the strategy articulated in the interim report (I-PRSP) presented...

The objective of this paper is to present some early experiences of poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) from the PRGF-supported programs in the African Department. The paper illustrates that many staff country reports have taken a first step toward PSIA by making more explicit the links...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with the implementation of 1993 SNAand the updating of the national accounts' base year. It also makes a preliminary assessment of the possible estimation biases in nominal GDP estimates stemming from the use of outdated national accounts base...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of technical assistance provided by AFRITAC West (AFW) in the area of national accounts using the Fund's Technical Assistance Information Management System (TAIMS). The challenge has been to report on "ultimate outcomes" (i.e., the production and...

Poverty in Dominica exhibits the following: poor households tend to be larger than nonpoor households; poor households contain proportionately fewer persons of working age, and there is no significant difference in the gender distribution of poverty in the country. The challenges of this...

Both national accounts and balance of payments are based on multiple, complex source data and typically undergo several routine revisions as more and better source data are incorporated into the final estimates. As a result, neither dataset can be subjected directly to the usual statistical...

This Selected Issues paper discusses capital and liquidity regulations in Sweden. It recaps the recent debates on capital and liquidity buffers, and discusses a way to consider appropriate levels of capital and liquidity buffers in the case of Sweden. The paper estimates the government’s...

This paper discusses the evaluation of technical assistance (TA) and training provided by the Statistical Department (STA) of the IMF to Peru during 1993–2011. The results showed that TA was reasonably effective, especially in the areas of government finance statistics, and responded well...