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)...

This paper investigates the medium- and long-term growth effects of the global financial crises on Low-Income Countries (LICs). Using several methodological approaches, including impulse response function analysis, growth spells techniques and panel regressions, we show that external demand (ED)...

This paper investigates the short-run effects of the 2007-09 global financial crisis on growth in (mainly non-fuel exporting) low-income countries (LICs). Four conclusions stand out. First, for many individual LICs, 2009 was not extraordinarily calamitous; however, aggregate LIC output declined...

This paper develops new, far more extensive estimates of export quality, covering 178 countries and hundreds of products over 1962–2010. Quality upgrading is particularly rapid during the early stages of development, with quality convergence largely completed as a country reaches upper...

Since 1999, the IMF's staff has been tracking several early-warning-system (EWS) models of currency crisis. The results have been mixed. One of the long-horizon models has performed well relative to pure guesswork and to available non-model-based forecasts, such as agency ratings and private...

This paper evaluates three models for predicting currency crises that were proposed before 1997. The idea is to answer the question: if we had been using these models in late 1996, how well armed would we have been to predict the Asian crisis? The results are mixed but somewhat encouraging. One...

The World Bank and the IMF have adopted a debt sustainability framework (DSF) to evaluate the risk of debt distress in Low Income Countries (LICs). At the core of the DSF are empirically-based thresholds for each of five different measures of the debt burden (the “debt threshold...

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)...

The current wave of technological revolution is changing the way policies work. This paper examines the growth and distributional implications of three policies when "robot'' capital (a broad definition of robots, Artificial Intelligence, computers, big data, digitalization, networks, sensors...

A new dataset on export sophistication reveals that in many countries the importance of modern services, and the sophistication of manufactured and service exports, has increased over time. However, this trend was less pronounced in LICs. Sophisticated sectors are more likely to act as a...