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...

Deepening real and financial integration of developing countries into the world economy has prompted renewed interest in the contribution of external shocks to their macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper revisits the issue using four decades of annual data for a large sample of developing...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

The authors consider external sustainability from the perspective of equilibrium in net foreign asset positions. Under their approach, an external situation is sustainable if it is consistent with international and domestic investors' achieving their desired portfolio allocation across...

This paper explores empirically the role of risk and return in the observed evolution of net foreign asset positions of industrial and developing economies. The paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors' portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run equilibrium, defined by a standard...

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...