Global investment patterns mean that effective taxation of foreign investors is of increasing importance to the economies of lower income countries. It is thus of considerable concern that the historical framework for cross-border income tax arrangements is not always well suited to allow...

While many have celebrated India's accelerating economic growth, some have expressed concern about the distributional impacts of the growth process. Cognizant of the vulnerability of its large population below poverty, India's authorities have made faster and more inclusive economic growth the...

The paper provides estimates of global relative poverty trends from 1970 onwards. Relative poverty is shown to have decreased significantly, but at the same time there has been a worsening poverty outcome among up to one billion of the world's poorest citizens. The paper also proposes a...

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

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...

We develop a tractable small open-economy model to study the first-round effects of international food price shocks in developing countries. We define first-round effects as changes in headline inflation that, holding core inflation constant, help implement relative price adjustments. The model...

This paper analyzes how differences in legal origin, judicial efficiency, and investor protection affect firm leverage and earnings volatility across developing countries. Using a large number of developing countries, four main findings are highlighted. First, firms in civil legal origin...

The Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) for low-income countries (LICs) is a standardized analytical tool to monitor debt sustainability. This paper uses DSAs from three periods around the time of the global economic crisis to analyze the projected trajectories of debt ratios for a sample of...

The degree of an economy's monetization, which has an important implication on economic growth, can be affected by the conduct of monetary policy, financial sector reform, and episodes of financial crises. The paper finds that monetization--measured by the ratio of broad money to nominal GDP--...

We develop a model to study the macroeconomic effects of public investment surges in low-income countries, making explicit: (i) the investment-growth linkages; (ii) public external and domestic debt accumulation; (iii) the fiscal policy reactions necessary to ensure debt-sustainability; and (iv)...