We show that a combination of temporariness and spending pressure is intrinsic to the aid relationship.  In our analysis, recipients rationally discount the pronouncements of donors about the duration of their commitments because in equilibrium they know that some donors will honor those...

In the vast majority of low-income countries, financing and political constraints have traditionally impaired the usefulness of fiscal policy as a short-run stabilization device. Indeed, it is widely recognized that fiscal policy in such countries has very often tended to be pro-cyclical. While...

This report considers alternative exchange rate arrangements for EAC countries in the transition to a monetary union.  Four main considerations shape our analysis.  First, while existing exchange rate policies differ in some important ways across the EAC, the Partner States have expressed a...

We focus on the management of highly persistent shocks to aid flows, including HIPC or MDG-related increases in net flows, in the presence of currency substitution by the domestic private sector. Such shocks have beneficient long-run effects, but when currency substitution is high they can...

It has been argued that the institutions of the CFA Franc zone may have reduced inflation but that they also induced misalignment of the real exchange rate and that this is the explanation for their dismal revenue performance. This paper uses a panel of 22 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to...

This paper provides a brief survey of issues associated with testing or regime shifts in the short-sample macroeconomic time series data found for African economies. Using Monte Carlo method the paper suggests that the power of standard tests on model stability is extremely low applied to the...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...

Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply side impact of aid financed public expenditure. We present a simple model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure generates an...

Real-time, quasi-real, `nearly real` and full sample output gaps for the UK, generated by linear and quadratic, Hodrick-Prescott filter and unobserved components (UC-ARIMA) techniques, are presented and analysed. Particular attention is paid to the behaviour of the different series during the...