While developing countries have made some progress in achieving human development since the turn of the century, many are still lagging behind in important human development goals such as education, health, nutrition and access to clean drinking water and improved sanitation. Moreover, gender...

This empirical paper explores the important policy issue of whether or not LDCs can achieve a long-run real exchange rate devaluation through a nominal devaluation. For this purpose, tests for cointegration and the estimation of the long-run relationship between the real and nominal exchange...

While developing countries have made some progress in achieving human development since the turn of the century, many are still lagging behind in important human development goals such as education, health, nutrition and access to clean drinking water and improved sanitation. Moreover, gender...

Economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, following the Industrial Revolutions, was much faster than in preceding centuries. This unprecedented global growth coincided with the global proliferation of democracy, with some evidence for bidirectional causation. Macroeconomic forecasts have...

Public welfare policies in developing countries have a Rawlsian perspective; they seek to uplift the poor, the poorest of the poor in particular. Policies to enable the poor to catch up with the rich are generally two-fold, viz., inclusive growth, and redistributive (transfer) programmes. This...

Developing countries employ a very large share of their workforce in agriculture, a sector in which their labor productivity is particularly low. We take a macroeconomic approach to analyze the role of agriculture in development. We construct a new database with systematic measures of inputs and...

The IMF began to play a prominent role in low-income countries in the late 1970s and 1980s when many countries faced overvalued exchange rates, growing budget deficits, high inflation, and low reserves. But times have changed, and many low-income countries no longer face these problems and do...

In the absence of U.S. fiscal adjustment and a further correction of the dollar, the current account deficit is headed to $1.3 trillion by 2010 (8 to 8.5 percent of GDP) and net U.S. foreign liabilities to over $8 trillion (50 percent of GDP). According to CGD/IIE Senior Fellow William R. Cline,...

This paper aims at showing heterogeneity in the degree of exchange rate pass-through to import prices in major advanced economies at three different levels: 1) across destination markets; 2) across types of exporters (distinguishing developed economy from emerging economy exporters); and 3) over...

This paper evaluates the literature on the lending programs of the IMF. The first section deals with the initiation of a Fund program, which has been shown to be influenced by political and institutional variables. A second focus of research analyzes the design and implementation of Fund...