Africa will account for 80 percent of the projected 4 billion increase in the global population by 2100. The accompanying increase in its working age population creates a window of opportunity, which if properly harnessed, can translate into higher growth and yield a demographic dividend. We...

The rapid growth in China’s domestic investment in recent decades has generated a large appetite for global goods, including from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper estimates the impact of changes in China’s investment growth on SSA’s exports. Although rising trading links...

Against the background of Mexico's persistently high degree of inequality, this paper analyzes the country's experience with pro-poor policies over the last decade. A number of important government initiatives, implemented since the mid-1990s, have aimed at improving distributional equity...

This paper discusses the role of government expenditure policies in the decline in aggregate output in European transition economies. It is argued that there is little evidence for the hypothesis that more expansionary expenditure policies would have helped to mitigate the output decline. While...

This paper analyzes the determinants of currency substitution in Bolivia in the period following the 1984/85 hyperinflation. We find that expected exchange rate depreciation and actual interest rate differentials between boliviano and dollar deposits in the Bolivian banking system are...

This paper argues that the IMF's traditional monetary conditionality-a ceiling on net domestic assets of the central bank and a floor on its net international reserves-should be adapted in IMF-supported adjustment programs with countries which have a framework of explicit inflation targets for...

It is commonly agreed that economic policies, including budgetary policies, can have potentially strong distributional effects. Traditional economic analysis held that economic policies affected the income distribution primarily through their impact on the rate of growth. More recently, it has...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. SCALING UP AID AND THE ROLE OF THE IMF -- III. WHY WAGE BILL CEILINGS? -- IV. WAGE BILL CONDITIONALITY IN PRACTICE -- V. DO WAGE BILL CEILINGS ACCOMMODATE DONOR-FINANCED WAGE SPENDING IN PRIORITY SECTORS? -- VI. IMPROVING WAGE BILL CONDITIONALITY --...

This paper addresses an apparent lack of economic theory in the analysis of multilateral development bank (MDB) behavior. A simple comparative statics model that is adapted from the credit union literature is used to predict potential areas of conflict, agreement, and indifference between MDB...

This paper argues that the brunt of the reform-induced increase in Polish social expenditures has been borne by social insurance arrangements (mainly pensions and unemployment compensation) rather than by social assistance schemes targeted to the poor or more temporary social safety net schemes....