The macroeconomic implications of a pension reform that substitutes a high-return fully-funded system for a low-return pay-as-you-go system are discussed in an overlapping generations, neoclassical growth model. With forward-looking individuals, a debt-financed reform worsens the current...

We develop an early-warning model of sovereign debt crises. A country is defined to be in a debt crisis if it is classified as being in default by Standard & Poor''s, or if it has access to nonconcessional IMF financing in excess of 100 percent of quota. By means of logit and binary recursive...

This paper reviews Lebanon''s ability to manage financial pressures following severe shocks despite its large public debt overhang and significant external vulnerabilities. Based on interviews with market participants in Beirut and London, the paper concludes that Lebanon''s ability to weather...

Using data for advanced economies, this paper investigates whether factors identified in the theoretical and empirical literature explain the effectiveness of fiscal policy in responding to recessions. The results are informative about the fiscal response to recessions but provide only a partial...

This paper investigates possible drivers of volatility in the South African rand since the onset of the global financial crisis. We assess the role played by local and international economic surprises, commodity price volatility, global market risk perceptions, and local political uncertainty....

This paper examines the relative importance of monetary factors and structuralist supply-side factors for inflation in Pakistan. A stylized inflation model is specified that includes standard monetary variables (money supply, credit to the private sector), the exchange rate, as well as the wheat...

For Afghanistan, the dual prospect of declining donor support and high ongoing security spending over the medium term keeps the government budget tight. This paper uses a general equilibrium model to capture the security-development tradeoff facing the government in its effort to rehabilitate...