Indonesia’s growth in 2009 was four and a half percent, the third highest in the G-20 group of countries; and the pace is accelerating in 2010. Both push and pull factors have attracted large portfolio inflows, particularly into government bonds and Short-term Bank Indonesia certificates...

The impact of monetary policy in large advanced countries on emerging market economies—dubbed spillovers—is hotly debated in global and national policy circles. When the U.S. resorted to unconventional monetary policy, spillovers on asset prices and capital flows were significant,...

This paper provides a definition of global liquidity consistent with its meaning as the “ease of financing†in international financial markets. Using a longer time series and broader sample of countries than in previous studies, it identifies global factors driving cross-border bank...

We study the dynamic response of gross capital flows in emerging market economies to different global financial shocks, using a panel vector-autoregressive (PVAR) setting. Our focus lies primarily on the potentially stabilizing role played by domestic investors in offsetting the response of...

This paper focuses on the coordination problem among borrowing countries imposing controls on capital infl ows. In a simple model of capital flows and controls, we show that inflow restrictions distort international capital flows to other countries and that, in turn, such capital flow deflection...

This primer aims to provide IMF macroeconomists with the essential information they need in situations where they must address issues concerning health sector policy and when they have significant macroeconomic implications. Such issues can also affect equity and growth and are fundamental to...

This paper seeks to document key characteristics of small island states in the Pacific. It restricts itself to a limited number of indicators which are macro-orientated - population, fertility of land, ability to tap into economies of scale, income, and geographic isolation. It leaves aside...

This paper reviews the literature on the informal economy, focusing first on empirical findings and then on existing approaches to modeling informality within both partial and general equilibrium environments. We concentrate on labour and credit markets, since these tend to be most affected by...

We compile the first large cross-country panel dataset of public sector performance and efficiency, encompassing 114 countries on all income levels from 1980 to 2006, with about 1,800 country-year observations for the education sector and about 900 observations for health. We regress these...

This paper benchmarks the efficiency of public expenditure in the social sectors in the Russian Federation relative to other countries and among the country's regions. It finds that there is substantial room for efficiency gains, particularly in health care and social protection, although less...