An adequate supply of infrastructure services has long been viewed by both academics and policy makers as a key ingredient for economic development. Over the past quarter-century, the retrenchment of Latin America's public sector from its dominant position in the provision of infrastructure, and...

Advanced and emerging market economies have rapidly integrated into international capital markets and this growing globalization of financial markets has led to some important changes in the patterns of saving and investment across the world. The main goal of this paper is to test whether the...

Using the dating algorithm by Harding and Pagan (2002) on a quarterly database for 23 emerging market economies (EMEs) and 12 developed countries over the period 1980.Q1 - 2006.Q2, the authors proceed to characterize and compare the business cycle features of these two groups. They first find...

This paper investigates how government interventions into banking systems such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This debate is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for borrower and...

Africa's Pulse is a biannual publication containing an analysis of the near-term macroeconomic outlook forthe region. Each issue also includes a section focusing upon a topic that represents a particular developmentchallenge for the continent. It is produced by the Office of the Chief Economist...

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to have decelerated from 2.5 percent in 2017 to 2.3percent in 2018, below the rate of growth of population for a fourth consecutive year. Regional growth in2018 is below the pace projected in 2018 October issue of Africa's Pulse {0.4 percentage...

Growth in sub-Saharan Africa has slightly recovered in 2019 (2.6 percent) from 2.5 percent in2018. Economic recovery continues at a sluggish pace with growth in the region expected to pickup to 3 .1 percent in 2020 and 3 .2 percent in 2021.Accelerating poverty reduction in Africa requires action...

This paper studies the cyclical aspects of fiscal policy in Sub-Saharan Africa countries during 1970-2014. It compares the cyclical properties of real government consumption in the region with those in other developing regions and high-income countries, and examines whether there has been a...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the roots of global imbalances, their role in the inception of the global crisis, and their prospects in its aftermath. The conventional view holds that global imbalances result primarily from unsustainably high demand for goods in the United...

Solvency is an intertemporal concept, relating to the present value of revenues and expenditures, and encompassing both assets and liabilities. But the standard practice among policy makers, financial market participants and international financial institutions is to assess the strength of the...