The 2009 European Report on Development analyses the costs and characteristics of fragility (Section 1), the capacity of fragile countries to cope with negative shocks such as the 2008-09 financial crisis (Section 2), and the EU’s current engagement with fragile countries as well as the...

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modeled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven by different default initial conditions. These initial conditions are...