This note assesses recent macroeconomic developments in Belarus and presents a medium-term economic outlook for 2013-2016 in three scenarios. These scenarios are sensitive to underlying assumptions and are provided to illustrate the main macroeconomic policy choices, available to Belarus. The...

An export-oriented development strategy fostered the Asia Pacific region's economic success, making it the fastest growing region in the world. In recent years, despite waning demand from the crisis-hit Western economies, the accelerating demand from China boosted intraregional trade in Asia....

This paper sketches a macroeconomic scenario for China for 2010-20. Growth accounting exercise finds that, with both the working population and total factor productivity on course to decelerate, potential gross domestic product (GDP) growth is likely to moderate in the coming 10 years, despite...

This paper examines how the dismantling of coercive institutions associated with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 affected the istribution of rents from natural resource exports. It identifies the interplay between coercive institutions and natural resource rents as an important...

This paper analyzes the effects of land market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the possibility of a reverse...

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty on overall trade and trade linked to global value chains. Using new data on policy uncertainty for 18 countries and 24 years, it finds a statistically significant negative impact of policy uncertainty on overall trade...

Ethiopia's framework for managing its monetary and foreign exchange policy has relied on some standard instruments of financial repression. Over time, the framework has led to the buildup of large macro-financial imbalances. Exiting financial repression while maintaining macroeconomic stability...