China has become a major "fear factor" in the global economy: there is fear of its competitive pressure on global markets and on demand for resources, and there is fear of the consequences for global growth if its economy hits a serious speed bump. China is usually given pretty good marks for...

This paper explores the challenges created by debt and fiscal stability in countries where major infrastructure investment is proposed. This paper specifically focuses on the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) and the $6 billion Lao PDR-People's Republic of China (PRC) high-speed railway...

A measure of the degree of debt monetisation is constructed for its impact on the business cycle to be studied in a standard VAR model. Debt monetisation is hardly expansionary, as it raises public demand that crowds out almost as much demand from the private sector. However, it generates...

Rebalancing growth toward domestic demand has emerged as a key postcrisis challenge for sustaining developing Asia's rapid growth in the medium and long term. The central objective of this paper is to explore the role of fiscal policy in the region's rebalancing process. What matters most for...

Motivating with two scenarios in which the government spending in China timely reacted to output shock within a quarter, this letter points out a downward bias in the estimation of Chinese government spending multiplier using the classical lag restriction for shock identification in a quarterly...

A canonical DSGE model for housing, extended to embrace government spending and governmentinvestment, is estimated on Chinese data to evaluate the impact of Öscal policy on house prices. Govern-ment spending substitutes for housing; a rise in government spending lowers house prices, but its...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic impact of China's 2009-2010 fiscal stimulus package by simulating a dynamic general equilibrium multi-country model of the world economy, showing that the effects on China's economic activity are sizeable: absent fiscal stimulus China's GDP would be 2.6 and...

Africa's sovereign debt markets are not well understood, partly due to a lack of data. This paper introduces the Africa Debt Database (ADD), the most granular and comprehensive dataset on external borrowing by African governments thus far. Our project moves beyond existing aggregate datasets and...

Chaos theory reveals structure in aperiodic, dynamic systems. The number of nonlinear business cycle models use chaos theory to explain complex motion of the economy. The basic aim of this paper is to provide a relatively simple chaotic economic growth model that is capable of generating stable...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to China as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. We first summarize a number of issues facing China, including the possibility of slower growth, global imbalances, and a number of domestic...