How did highly indebted poor countries become highly indebted after two decades of debt relief efforts? A set of theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief with a mixture of asset decumulation and new borrowing. A model also...

Fiscal deficits have been at the forefront of macroeconomic adjustment in the 1980s, both in developing and developed countries. Fiscal deficits were blamed in good part for the assortment of ills that beset developing countries in the 1980s: over-indebtedness leading to the debt crisis...

The recent Thai boom has been accomplished in an economy with considerable openness to external forces. Despite the fiscal correction achieved during 1986-89, the domestic demand expansion has made itself felt in a widening of the current account deficit. While this deficit partly reflects the...

Fiscal adjustment is an illusion when it lowers the budget deficit or public debt but leaves the government's net worth unchanged, says the author. Conventional measures of the budget deficit largely measure the change in explicit public sector liabilities (debt). A more appropriate measure of...

Macroeconomic consistency is the requirement that budget constraints be observed for all participants in the economy. This paper presents the elements of a macroeconomic accounting framework in current prices. The framework is based on five accounts, corresponding to the following macro...

The authors examine Russia's macroeconomic crisis in 1992 and 1993, focusing on fiscal and monetary policies. They show how the large transfers from the government to the enterprise sector exacerbated the crisis. Money creation did not finance the narrow (cash) budget deficit of the government....

The model presented in this paper is in between RMSM-X and RMSM-XX in that, unlike RMSM-X, it does incorporate behavioural functions for the main macroeconomic variables, namely private consumption, private investment, money demand, demand for quasi money,export supply, and import demand....

Analysis of decade-long growth rates in all countries shows a striking regularity: episodes of rapid growth are limited largely to a middle range of initial income; neither very poor nor very rich countries experienced rapid growth. Episodes of negative growth are limited to low and middle-income...

The author presents a simple endogenous growth model (with two types of capital) that shows the sizable long-run effects on growth of distortionary policies. The model applies to many different types of distortions of relative prices common in developing countries - for example, price controls,...

After years of poor economic performance, many Latin American countries undertook ambitious programs of macroeconomic stabilization andstructural reform in recent years. This change in policy created high expectations for the region, and some observers have questioned whether actual growth...