Reforming subsidies can be a complex and politically difficult process. Countries embarking on this journey underline the need for understanding the political context of reform, crafting the right energy pricing, designing solutions that mitigate the adverse impacts of reform on affected...

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, policymakers around the world are focusing once again on government debt sustainability. In China, subnational government debt is an important part of total government debt, and therefore deserves the attention that policymakers have paid to the...

This paper uses a growth diagnostics approach à la Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) to identify the most'binding'constraints to private sector growth in Mongolia - a small, low-income, mineral-rich, transition economy. The approach of applying the HRV methodology is useful in those cases...

This paper introduces an"index of macroeconomic space"-- demonstrating the ability of acountry to run a countercyclical fiscal policy or a fiscal stimulus at any point in time -- to show how a sample of 20 mostly middle-income countries had entered the 2008 global financial crisis with different...

Increasing portfolio investment flows to emerging markets in the past few years have led to fears of a sudden reversal of these flows and possible portfolio switching (from one emerging market to another) among foreign investors. To assess the sustainability of such portfolio flows, the author...

The 1990s brought developing countries the heaviest private capital flows since the early 1980s, says the author - mainly bond and equity financing, rather than medium- and long-term lending by commercial banks. Flows were mainly to Asia in the first half and Latin America in the second half....