This report summarizes key results from a 2012 survey of businesses in Papua New Guinea. It compares the results with the 2002 and 2007 surveys and shows that, while the business environment has improved since 2002, doing business in Papua New Guinea remains extremely challenging. Continued...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes sustaining potential growth in Aruba. As in the other Caribbean countries, there are growing concerns in Aruba about the slowdown in economic growth over the past two decades and the consequent tepid outlook for potential growth. Tackling such concerns...

This article shows how institutional quality can affect the relationship between trade and growth. Our model looks at an economy in which the export sector is a high-innovation sector. In this economy, a government that is politically threatened by innovation can use its tariff policy to block...

Effective public investment requires governments to address the "recurrent cost problem" to ensure operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures are sufficient to sustain the flow of productive public capital services to private factors of production. Building on the model of Buffie et al...

This Selected Issues paper estimates both Guatemala’s potential output and output gap using a wide range of econometric techniques. The analysis suggests that Guatemala’s potential output growth is about 3.5 percent for the whole sample period and that the output gap is almost...

Following very strong growth during the period 2000–12, emerging market economies (EMEs) experienced a slowdown in the last couple of years. This paper examines the supply-side drivers of the strong growth performance of 63 EMEs and investigates if the recent slowdown in growth is...

In this study we show that the inflation rate and the current account behaved according to historical regularities, once the international crisis hit Romania in the second half of 2008. Inflation has decreased relatively fast for a long period of time, and the current account deficit has reduced...

A relação entre desigualdade e renda na forma de “U” invertido, conhecida como a hipótese de Kuznets, ainda é bastante controversa. Diversos trabalhos têm analisado os dados brasileiros, mas os resultados não são tão claros quanto a sua validade. Este artigo investiga essa relação...

ILO pub-WEP pub. Working paper on industrial structure change in a small open economy, comprising a case study of adjustment successes in the Netherlands - discusses the economic structure, economic growth trends (1960-1983), and impact of economic recession and international division of labour...