Structural conditionality of IMF-supported programs is designed to support structural reforms by countries borrowing from the IMF. Taking stock of program conditions and their implementation, this paper finds that conditionality focuses on fiscal, monetary and financial issues-areas where IMF...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects and sequencing of (LMRs) and product (PMRs) market reforms in Morocco. It finds that introducing LMRs and PMRs simultaneously would add about 2.5 percentage points (pp) of GDP growth and reduce unemployment by about 2.2 pp after five years. If...

Empirical evidence on the relationship between democracy and economic reforms is limited to few reforms, countries, and years. This paper studies the impact of democracy on the adoption of economic reforms using a new dataset on reforms in the financial, capital and banking sectors, product...

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...

Three years have passed since the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program was introduced in 2011, causing a sharp decline in the value of the Japanese Yen. What would be the implications for Japan and Korea’s exporters if the weak Yen is here to stay? We explore this question by examining...

This paper examines the effect of international trade on corporate market power in emerging market economies and developing countries, with a special focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The analysis is based on a large firm-level dataset, tariff data by sector and agreggate indicators of international...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a government regulation that forces a patented equipment to be supplied by a number of independent producers. On the one hand, such a regulation hurts the value of a patent and therefore reduces activities in the R&D sector. On the other hand, the...

As in other sectors, competition in finance matters for allocative, productive and dynamic efficiency. Theory suggests, however, that unfettered competition is not first best given the special features of finance. I review these analytics and describe how to assess the degree of competition in...