There is a strong economic rationale for close cooperation between the public and private sectors. This has resulted in a significant increase in the demand for the provision of public services through instruments combining public and private money such as public-private partnerships (PPPs or...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. THE SCOPE OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS -- III. BUILD-OPERATE -- IV. IDENTIFICATION OF THE ENDOGENOUS AND EXOGENOUS RISKS -- V. "WHITE ELEPHANTS" -- VI. COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS: PRICES AND DISCOUNT RATES -- VII. THE ALLOCATION OF RISK BETWEEN THE PUBLIC...

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly an important vehicle for several Western Balkan countries to increase investment to reduce their infrastructure gaps. While there are benefits to well-designed and implemented PPPs, they also carry a potential for large fiscal risks and...

The global financial crisis is creating stress on banking systems across the world through funding and asset quality shocks. This paper combines different stress scenarios, as well as cross-country analysis, to assess New Zealand bank vulnerabilities to the global crisis and the domestic...

In this paper, the IMF's new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the contribution of unbalanced growth to the decline in the share of goods production in Australia and New Zealand. The simulation results suggest that faster productivity growth in the tradable goods sector in...

We use the novel anonymized Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS) microdata to analyze job finding rates and job separation rates in New Zealand. We find that individual characteristics, including age, gender, ethnicity and education have a significant impact on job finding and separation rates,...

This paper presents a simple heuristic measure of tail risk, which is applied to individual bank stress tests and to public debt. Stress testing can be seen as a first order test of the level of potential negative outcomes in response to tail shocks. However, the results of stress testing can be...

This paper investigates the effects of national culture on firm risk-taking, using a comprehensive dataset covering 50,000 firms in 400 industries in 51 countries. Risk-taking is found to be higher for domestic firms in countries with low uncertainty aversion, low tolerance for hierarchical...

Well-known empirical puzzles in international macroeconomics concern the large divergence of equilibrium outcomes for consumption across countries from the predictions of models with full risk sharing. It is commonly believed that these risk-sharing puzzles are related to another empirical...

The recent crisis has spurred the use of stress tests as a (crisis) management and early warning tool. However, a weakness is that they omit potential risks embedded in the banking groups' geographical structures by assuming that capital and liquidity are available wherever they are needed...