Over the past decade, a large number of low- and lower-middle income 'frontier economies' have begun to access international private capital markets to meet fiscal financing needs. In this paper we seek to identify drivers of this trend, identify associated risks, and present policy implications...

This edition of Global Trade Watch addresses three questions concerning recent trade developments: What is happening? Why? Does it matter? 2016 is the fifth consecutive year of sluggish trade growth and the year with the weakest trade performance since the aftermath of the 2008 global financial...

An open economy structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is developed for Belize with the objective of identifying the main factors behind the volatility in output growth. A MarkovSwitching VAR (MS-VAR) model is also employed to explore whether the response to shocks is the similar across...

A large and growing literature has argued that industrialized and developing countries behave very differently in relation to their fiscal policy stances over the business cycle. In this paper, the authors provide new evidence on the cyclicality of fiscal policy across industrialized and...

A competitive city is a city that successfully facilitates its firms and industries to create jobs, raise productivity, and increase the incomes of citizens over time. Worldwide, improving the competitiveness of cities is a pathway to eliminating extreme poverty and to promoting shared...