This paper considers the extent of retail banking integration in the Communauteacute; Economique et Moneacute;taire d'Afrique Centrale (CEMAC) and the level of bank competition at the regional level. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative indicators, the paper finds some evidence of price...

Climate change is an existential threat to the world economy like no other, with complex, evolving and nonlinear dynamics that remain a source of great uncertainty. There is a bourgeoning literature on the economic impact of climate change, but research on how climate change affects sovereign...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has helped accelerate the digitization of public services. The lockdown initiated by most governments to curb the spread of the coronavirus forced most public agencies to switch to online platforms to continue providing information and services to the...

This paper dives into the Fund’s historical coverage of cross-border spillovers in its surveillance. We use a state-of-the-art deep learning model to analyze the discussion of spillovers in all IMF Article IV staff reports between 2010 and 2019. We find that overall, while the discussion of...

We examine electoral cycles in tax reforms using monthly data over the period of 1990-2018 for 22 advanced economies and emerging markets. We show that governments tend to avoid announcing tax reforms during the months running up to elections. In addition, they become more likely to announce...

High persistence of state fragility (a fragility trap) suggests the presence of substantial benefits from avoiding a fall into fragility and considerable hurdles to successful exit from fragility. This paper empirically examines the factors that affect the turning points of entering and exiting...

This paper analyses inflation dynamics in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) using a constructed dataset for country-specific commodity price indices and panel cointegrated vector autoregressive (VAR) models. Imported commodity price shocks are significant in explaining...

In this paper we investigate whether better information about the macroeconomic environment of an economy has a positive impact on its capital inflows, namely portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of our study is to explicitly quantify information asymmetries by compliance...

Mobilizing more revenue is a priority for sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Countries have to finance their development agendas, and weak revenue mobilization is the root cause of fiscal imbalances in several countries. This paper reviews the experience of low-income SSA countries in...