Rapid growth of Islamic banking in developing countries is accompanied with claims about its relative resilience to financial crises as compared to conventional banking. However, little empirical evidence is available to support such claims. Using data from Pakistan, where Islamic and...

Natural resource revenues provide a valuable source to finance public investment in developing countries, which frequently face borrowing constraints and tax revenue mobilization problems. This paper develops a dynamic stochastic small open economy model to analyze the macroeconomic effects of...

Over the past seven years, the DIG and DIGNAR models have complemented the IMF and World Bank debt sustainability framework (DSF) analysis, over 65 country applications. They have provided useful insights in the context of program and surveillance work, based on qualitative and quantitative...

This paper presents the DIGNAR (Debt, Investment, Growth, and Natural Resources) model, which can be used to analyze the debt sustainability and macroeconomic effects of public investment plans in resource-abundant developing countries. DIGNAR is a dynamic, stochastic model of a small open...

This paper analyzes the tradeoffs between savings, debt and public investment in the Republic of Congo, a developing country with looming oil exhaustibility concerns. Our results highlight the risks to fiscal and capital sustainability of oil exporting countries from large scaling-up in public...

Public investment is key to growth in developing oil-exporting countries and oil revenue is an important source of finance for public investment. Assessing the growth impact of public investment in Iran under various investment scaling-up (gradual, aggressive, and conservative) and oil price...

Based on stylized evidence showing variation of the Gini coefficient of income inequality across skill cohorts and on the rapid rise in trade in technology-intensive goods, the ripple effects of technology transmission and income inequality are explored in a global Computable General Equilibrium...

This paper contributes to the literature by looking at the possible relevance of the structure of the financial system-whether financial intermediation is performed through banks or markets-for macroeconomic volatility, against the backdrop of increased policy attention on strengthening growth...

This paper employs a meta-regression analysis of 473 estimates from 15 studies to take stock of the empirical literature on Chinese aid effectiveness. After accommodating publication selection bias, we find that, on average, Beijing’s foreign assistance has had a positive impact on economic...

We study the long-run and multi-generational effects of a mass education program in Vietnam during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Difference-in-difference estimations indicate that the children of mothers exposed to the education program had an average of 0.9 more years of education. We...