Fiscal policy is central to a country's economic and social objectives, from macroeconomic stability to sustainable growth and poverty reduction. But evaluations of a country's fiscal performance, over time or relative to other countries, are often conducted independent of other development...

Egypt has been able to escape high inflation by depleting its stocks of creditworthiness, money illusion, and enforceable foreign-exchange controls. These nonrecoverable assets are quickly becoming extinct and the economy is on an unsustainable path. The authors present a short- and medium-term...

Facing runaway inflation and budget discipline problems in the early 1990s, the Zambian government introduced the so-called cash budget in which government domestic spending is limited to domestic revenue, leaving no room for excess spending. The authors review Zambia's experience during the...

Although Egypt's budget deficit is far above the level found in other low-middle-income countries, the inflation rate in Egypt has never been very high. This is because the country has managed to finance these budget deficits by resorting to an inflation tax that, at 11 percent of GDP in 1987,...

Links between social capital, human capital, and product imitation are studied in an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth where the key benefit of social capital is to promote imitation. There is also a two-way interaction between imitation and human capital. Building social...

This paper studies the role of public policy in promoting industrial transformation from an imitationbased, low-skill economy to an innovation-based, high-skill economy, where technological progress now occurs through the domestic invention of ideas. Industrial transformation is measured by...

An appropriate interest rate policy is considered essential to the success of stabilization and adjustment programs that Egypt might undertake. The broad objectives of such a policy would include deregulating credit and investment, raising the interest rate, and developing a"core"short-term debt...

Modern economic development is accompanied by the structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy and occurs through a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully in Europe, North America...

A growth model with multiple industries is developed to study how industries evolve as capital accumulates endogenously when each industry exhibits Marshallian externality (increasing returns to scale) and to explain why industrial policies sometimes succeed but sometimes fail. The authors show...

The world is currently still struggling with the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Following a description of the eruption, evolution and consequences of the global crisis, this paper reviews alternative hypotheses for the causes of the global financial crisis as...