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...

In recent years the level of taxation of many developing countries has changed dramatically over relatively short periods. These changes are too large and too sudden to attribute fully to a deterioration in tax administration or to changes in the traditional determinants of tax levels. The paper...

This paper creates the first dataset of bilateral remittance flows for a limited set of developing countries and estimates a gravity model for workers' remittances. We find that most of the variation in bilateral remittance flows can be explained by a few gravity variables. The evidence on the...

This paper examines the role of tax administration in developing countries from an economic perspective. The traditional separation of tax policy and tax administration in the literature is shown to break down in developing countries, where tax administrators decide in what manner complicated...

The paper discusses the improvements which a semi-autonomous revenue agency (SARA) must make to its records to meet fiscal and financial accounting obligations. SARAs are legal entities, such as a service or a department, which are required to prepare accrual records that may diverge from a...

The paper analyzes the factors that contribute to the re-access of countries that emerge from a severe financial crisis to the international capital markets. It conjectures that these factors depend on a sovereign's commitment and ability to repay its foreign debt, signaled by sound...

The paper examines the implications of lower trade barriers for sectoral diversification and macroeconomic stability in developing economies with a large primary goods sector. It shows that lower trade barriers can have ambiguous effects on macroeconomic stability. It shows also that...

This paper analyzes the effects of trade openness on budget balances by distinguishing the effects of natural openness from those of trade-policy induced openness. Using the GMMsystem estimator, the econometric analysis focuses on 66 developing countries during 1974-98. The results show that...