The role of foreign aid in the growth process of developing countries has been a topic of intense debate. Foreign aid is an important topic given its implications for poverty reduction in developing countries.Since the second World War, foreign aid has been one of the most prominent policy tools...

This paper explores the drivers of sovereign defaults in 100 countries over the period 1996-2012. We build a new data set of sovereign defaults and find that default events on local and foreign currency bonds are equally likely. However, governments default under different economic and financial...

Historically, sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than debt in foreign currency. Yet the literature offers scant theoretical or empirical guidance as to why such a gap exists, or why it appears to have slowly and steadily diminished for all regions over the past two...

Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

The Morocco Policy Analysis model (MOPAM) was created in the Bank Al-Maghrib to simulate the impact of external developments, domestic macroeconomic policies, and structural reforms on key macroeconomic aggregates. We describe its structure and demonstrate its operation on two medium-term...

This paper examines ways to summarize the maturity structure of public debts using a small number of parameters. We compile a novel dataset of all promised future payments for US and UK government debt from every month since 1869, and more recently for Peru, Poland, Egypt, and Nigeria. We show...

This paper examines the interactions between monetary regimes and public debt management. The analysis shows that delegation of monetary policy to an independent central bank is more effective in containing inflationary expectations than the use of foreign currency or price-indexed debt. If...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...

The paper considers the choice of a tax system in the transition from socialism. The paper reviews the tax system in Bulgaria inherited from socialism and revenues generated in the early transition. It then describes the relatively high tax rate, Western European-type tax system introduced in...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...