Bahrain's financial sector development strategy succeeded in building a leading regional banking center, which has become one of the main engines of growth and sources of employment. Although the simulations conducted in the paper suggest that the banking sector in Bahrain continues to occupy a...

We use bank level data to study the efficiency of banks in Sub-Saharan African middle-income countries and provide possible explanations for the difference in the efficiency levels of banks. We find that banks, on average, could save 20-30 percent of their total costs if they were operating...

This paper develops new, far more extensive estimates of export quality, covering 178 countries and hundreds of products over 1962–2010. Quality upgrading is particularly rapid during the early stages of development, with quality convergence largely completed as a country reaches upper...

After a short-lived slowdown in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis and a swift rebound, emerging markets (EM) are now entering a period of slower growth. In fact, growth is now lower than the post-crisis peak of 2010-11, as well as the rates seen in the decade before the...

This Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes Data Module provides a review of Canada’s data dissemination practices against the IMF’s special data dissemination standard (SDDS), complemented by the in-depth assessment of the quality of six key sets of macroeconomic...

This report on the Russian Federation’s Observance of Standards and Codes highlights the Data Module and response by the authorities. Russia’s statistical system has made good progress in adopting international statistical methodologies in response to the need to capture in the...

This data module of the Report on Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) for Mexico contains a brief assessment of dissemination practices relative to the Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS) of the IMF. The findings reveal that dissemination of data subject to the SDDS is in observance...

The coverage, periodicity, and timeliness for macroeconomic data in Peru are summarized and compared with Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS) specifications. The human, financial, and computing resources allocated to the existing program of statistics at the Central Reserve Bank of Peru...