The author describes a spread-sheet planning model to help determine the government deficit consistent with a policymaker's "vector" of principal macroeconomic objectives (including real GDP growth, inflation, exchange rate, and international reserve accumulation). The model focuses on the...

Over the 1980s and 1990s, GDP growth had stagnated because of oil export price volatility and natural disasters, the sacrifice of capital formation to heavy external public debt service, and incomplete and uneven structural reform. The exchange rate depreciation that proved continually necessary...