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...

Liberia''s experience with a dual currency regime, with the U.S. dollar enjoying legal tender status, dates to its founding as a sovereign country in 1847. Following the end of the most recent episode of civil war in late-2003, the new government has expressed interest in strengthening the role...

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which financial development no longer has a positive effect on economic growth. We use different empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be ""too much"" finance. In particular, our results suggest that finance starts having a...

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 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...

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...

Since the global financial crisis, non-reserve-issuing economies (NREs) have been highly sensitive to episodes of external pressures. With monetary policy independence constrained by this sensitivity, many NREs have utilized other policy instruments. This paper confirms the vulnerability of NREs...

Commodity prices have declined sharply over the past three years, and output growth has slowed considerably among countries that are net exporters of commodities. A critical question for policy makers in these economies is whether commodity windfalls influence potential output. Our analysis...