Economic policies are often judged by a handful of statistics, some of which may be biased during periods of change. We estimate the income growth implied by the evolution of food demand and durable good ownership in post-reform Brazil and Mexico, and find that changes in consumption patterns...

Over the last thirty years Burundi's low economic growth has led to a significant decline in per capita GDP. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on supply-side constraints that prevented Burundi's economy from growing faster. Lack of investment, civil conflict, economic inefficiencies,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that have constrained South Africa's growth since the end of apartheid by comparing its GDP components and its saving and investment performance with those of 10 faster-growing countries. The study finds that sluggish investment has undermined...

Reliable national accounts are essential for proper economic analyses and informed policymaking by national authorities as well as other stakeholders. Nevertheless, in many countries, national accounts statistics are subject to serious shortcomings, which are often manifested as overestimated...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The estimated elasticity is 1.55 for...

This paper provides new empirical evidence of the impact of an unanticipated change in public debt on real GDP. Using public debt forecast errors, we identify exogenous changes in public debt to assess the impact of a change in the debt to GDP ratio on real GDP. By analyzing data on gross public...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

This paper extends the long-run growth model of Esfahani et al. (2009) to a labor exporting country that receives large inflows of external income?the sum of remittances, FDI and general government transfers?from major oil-exporting economies. The theoretical model predicts real oil prices to be...

The paper presents a comparative analysis of macroeconomic dynamics of 18 Arab countries based on a panel vector autogression estimation. Comparing growth performance, fiscal and current account developments in these countries, the study concludes that (1) in the short run, external and...

This paper investigates empirically the sources of aggregate output growth and the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) in Niger between 1963 and 2003. A growth accounting analysis indicates that the erosion in output per capita over the sample period is due to the negative growth of...