While China's growth gathered momentum in 2017, rebalancing was uneven and decelerated along many dimensions reflecting the temporary factors behind the growth pickup. Going forward, rebalancing is expected to proceed as these temporary factors recede, but elevated income inequality and leverage...

High levels of economic policy uncertainty in various parts of the world revamped the de- bate about its impact on economic activity. With increasingly stronger economic, financial, and political ties among countries, economic agents have more reasons to be vigilant of for- eign economic policy....

Based on the experience of the Bank of Albania, the paper proposes a framework to estimate the interest rate lower bound in small, open, and euroized economies. The paper introduces a stylized monitoring tool to assess the unintended consequences of low policy rates. The paper is the first...

Monetary and fiscal policies around the world are in better shape today than two decades ago. This paper studies whether financial globalization has helped induce governments to pursue better macroeconomic policies (the ""discipline effect""). The empirical tests have two innovations. First, we...

This paper studies how macroeconomic policies can help offset two unintended and undesirable features of foreign aid: its volatility and Dutch disease. We present evidence that aid volatility augments trade balance volatility and that foreign aid, with the important exception of years of adverse...

Rapidly rising dollarization and numerous related financial crises in recent years have heightened the need for policy action. This paper contributes to the policy debate by presenting a common analytic framework that examines the roots of de facto financial dollarization under different...

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...

The shift to inflation targeting has contributed to the relatively low inflation observed in some emerging market economies although, as noted by many economists, the preconditions required for a successful implementation were not in place. The existence of managed exchange rate regimes, a...