The 2006 Article IV Consultation on the Republic of Uzbekistan highlights the economic outlook and policy challenges. The banking system’s ability to fulfill its intermediary role has been constrained by limited credit expansion, given the strong growth in net foreign assets and the need...

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

The loss of trade preferences in textiles in 2005, the reform to the European Union’s sugar protocol for 2006–10, and higher international oil prices have brought about a permanent deterioration in Mauritius’s terms of trade. This 2007 Article IV Consultation highlights that...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital...

This paper applies the Permanent Income Model to the non-oil current accounts of the major oil exporters to assess the extent to which national consumption decisions in these countries are made on the basis of permanent versus current income. A test of whether the return on oil wealth and oil...

The high primary school enrolment rates in Latin America and the Caribbean mask poor performance in terms of the quality, relevance and cost-effectiveness of formal schooling in the region. What happens to the millions of children who repeat school years, underperform in their first years of...

We employ World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected in 2006–2010 for 21,852 firms from 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries to investigate determinants of the adoption of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification, the relation between ISO certification and firm...

Die 1991 begonnene tendenzielle Stagnation hat sich auch 1996 fortgesetzt. Das reale Bruttoinlandsprodukt (BIP) ist wahrscheinlich um 0,5% bis 1% gesunken. Die Lage auf dem Arbeitsmarkt hat sich weiter verschlechtert. 1997 kann das reale BIP bei leicht sinkender Inlandsnachfrage das Niveau von...

Die mexikanische Währungskrise entstand aus einer ungünstigen Konstellation monetärer und politischer Faktoren: das Leistungsbilanzdefizit war in zunehmendem Maße durch Zuflüsse von Portfoliokapital finanziert worden, das - als sich die politischen Unruhen im Laufe des vergangenen Jahres...