Statistical offices have often recourse to benchmarking methods for compiling quarterly national accounts (QNA). Benchmarking methods employ quarterly indicator series (i) to distribute annual, more reliable series of national accounts and (ii) to extrapolate the most recent quarters not yet...

Is rapid economic growth experienced by the East African Community during the past decade built on solid foundations? To gain some clues, we use a variety of newly-collected and existing data sources to analyze the structural transformation of output and exports, as well as indicators of their...

Using monthly data for a set of variables, we examine the out-of-sample performance of various variance/covariance models and find that no model has consistently outperformed the others. We also show that it is possible to increase the probability mass toward the tails and to match reasonably...

A stochastic volatility model where volatility was driven solely by a latent variable called news was estimated for three stock indices. A Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm was used for estimating Bayesian parameters and filtering volatilities. Volatility persistence being close to one was...

This paper explores the impact of high public debt on long-run economic growth. The analysis, based on a panel of advanced and emerging economies over almost four decades, takes into account a broad range of determinants of growth as well as various estimation issues including reverse causality...

Potential Output is a key factor for debt sustaintability analysis and for developing strategies for growth, but unfortunately it is an unobservable variable. Using three methodologies (production function, switching, and state-space), this paper computes potential output for CAPDR countries...

The paper proposes an algorithm that uses forecast encompassing tests for combining forecasts. The algorithm excludes a forecast from the combination if it is encompassed by another forecast. To assess the usefulness of this approach, an extensive empirical analysis is undertaken using a U.S....