In the past few years, India has emerged as a global economic power. It is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, the leading outsourcing destination, and a favorite of international investors. But even with India’s impressive recent achievements, the country continues to face...

One result of the IMF's move to increased openness are independent external evaluations of important IMF policies, to complement its own in-house evaluations. This paper, prepared by a team of evaluators, includes in addition to the external evaluation, a statement by Bernd Esdar, Chairman of...

Not unpredictably, there is a complex energy bind as we approach the end of the twentieth century. The oil importing industrial countries have anchored their industries, their means of transportation, their home comfort- in short, their whole energy-dependent lifestyle-largely to hydrocarbon fuels

The share of emerging Asia in world trade has increased sharply over the past 25 years. A large part of this increase is the result of booming intraregional trade. This paper investigates the key factors behind the rapid increase in intraregional trade among economies in emerging Asia and its...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

We test the extent to which growth in the 11 CIS countries (excluding Russia) was associated with developments in Russia, overall, as well as through the trade, financial and remittance channels over the last decade or so. The results point to the continued existence of economic links between...

This paper uses a dynamic optimization model to estimate the welfare gains of hedging against commodity price risk for commodity-exporting countries. The introduction of hedging instruments such as futures and options enhances domestic welfare through two channels. First, by reducing export...

Should policymakers still be concerned about economic growth in trading partners? Have developing and emerging market countries decoupled from the US enough to grow despite significant recession in the US? Using VAR models, this paper addresses these questions for Nigeria in the context of the...

This paper reviews controversies regarding linkage of international trade and labor standards. Pressures for international harmonization of labor standards arise in the context of increased trade between countries with large disparities in wages, and also reflect the history of labor standards....