There is much speculation regarding a “race for dominance” among financial centers in Asia, arising from the anticipated financial opening up of China. This frame of reference is, to an extent, a predilection that results from a traditional understanding of financial centers as possessing...

Gender budgeting is an approach to fiscal policy and administration that integrates considerations of women's equality and advancement into the budget. Latin American countries have undertaken diverse gender budgeting initiatives, most of them addressing public expenditures. This paper surveys...

This paper uses a DSGE model to simulate the impact of technological change on labor markets and income distribution. It finds that technological advances offers prospects for stronger productivity and growth, but brings risks of increased income polarization. This calls for inclusive policies...

In developing economies, a shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic varies substantially. An increase in teleworking days per week ranges from 0.7 to 17.6 percentage points across 10 developing countries covered by an online survey to about 500 respondents per country. An...

What are the potential benefits of increasing the taxation of a foreign extractive sector? This paper applies this question to the case of Guinea by using a multi-sector macro-inequality model with heterogeneous agents. We quantify the long-run equilibrium impact of additional taxation when the...

Inflation in low-income countries is often high and volatile, driven by external shocks. In addition, inflation in fragile states is affected by highly volatile domestic factors that complicate monetary policy’s ability to deliver price stability. We estimate the drivers of inflation in Guinea...

There are growing concerns that 25 years after the launch of the HIPC debt relief initiative, many low-income countries are again facing high debt vulnerabilities. This paper compares debt vulnerabilities in LICs today versus those on the eve of the HIPC Initiative and examines challenges to a...

The paper reviews the stylized facts on economic growth gathered by Easterly and Levine in their 2001 joint paper and illustrates some of the points made on the basis of data from the IMF's World Economic Outlook on real growth and per capita GDP since 1970. The data show that the growth...

This paper uses a partial equilibrium framework to evaluate the relative efficiency, distributional and revenue implications of rice tariffs and targeted transfers in Madagascar, especially in the context of identifying their respective roles for poverty alleviation. Although there are likely to...

While new conventional wisdom warns that developing countries should be aware of the risks of premature capital account liberalization, the costs of not removing exchange controls have received much less attention. This paper investigates the negative effects of exchange controls on trade. To...