The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

The role of the international commodity market in transmitting disturbances is considered in a model that incorporates commodities as an input in production. The analysis employs a three-country framework: a liquidity-constrained commodity supplier and two industrial countries that import the...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. The focus is on the size of fiscal multipliers, and on the possibility that multipliers can turn negative (i.e., that fiscal contractions can be expansionary). The paper concludes that fiscal...

This paper uses an overlapping generations model with international labor mobility and a politically responsive fiscal policy to examine aging in developed and developing regions. Migrant workers change the political structure composed of young and elderly voters in both labor-receiving and...

An overview of crisis episodes in emerging-market economies with a pegged exchange rate regime in the 1990s suggests that sizable explicit or implicit government deficits, or market perceptions of lack of fiscal sustainability, render these economies vulnerable to currency crises under high...

This paper considers the consequences of international financial market integration for national fiscal and monetary policies that derive from the absence of an international sovereign authority to define and enforce contractual obligations across borders. The sovereign immunity of national...

International coordination of macroeconomic policies has attracted much attention in recent years. The main issue has been whether economic performance can be improved by coordination Although it is still a controversial issue many economists have argued that coordination would make a positive...

This paper examines the empirical link between fiscal policy and the current account focusing on microstates defined as countries with a population of less than 2 million between 1970 and 2009. The paper employs panel regression and panel vector autoregression (VAR) on 155 countries of which 42...