Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

The objective of this paper is to discuss macroeconomic policies that would help African countries, especially the low income countries, reach strong, sustained and shared growth in the post-crisis world. The paper first reviews, with a special focus on LICs, macroeconomic policies in Africa...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms. In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paper presents a...

This paper examines capital account policy choices in an innovative model with adaptive learning under uncertainty. In the model, countries’ past experiences and IMF programs influence policymakers’ beliefs about impact of capital account liberalization on growth, taking into account...

The heightened interest of African countries to access international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continent’s policy agenda. Applying the ‘stabilizing primary balance approach’ to sustainability shows that the primary balances exceeded those...

Drawing on the 2007 and 2010 Swaziland Labor Force Surveys, this paper provides first systematic evidence on recent youth employment challenges in Swaziland, a small, land-locked, middle-income country with one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Africa. The paper first documents the...

With the year 2015 – the MDG finishing line – approaching, post-2015 goals as they impact Africa need to be firmed. The goal of ending extreme poverty remains paramount. Globally, the World Bank set goals to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to promote shared prosperity in every society. We...

This paper studies learning-by-exporting, based on survey data of knowledge flow indicators. Most of the earlier related papers investigate the effects of exporting on productivity of firms, and often find little evidence of learning effects. This study looks more in detail into the mechanism of...

This paper reproduces a version of the New Keynesian model developed by Ireland (2004) and then uses the Vietnamese data from January 1995 to December 2012 to estimate the model’s parameters. The empirical results show that before August 2000 when the Taylor rule was adopted more firmly, the...

The unemployment rate in Estonia rose sharply in 2010 to one of the highest levels in the EU, after thecountry entered a severe recession in 2008. While the rate declined relatively rapidly in 2011, it remained high especially for the less educated. In 2009, the Employment Contract Law relaxed...