Development is about fundamental change in economic structures, about the movement of resources out of agriculture to services and industry, about migration to cities and international movement of labor, and about transformation in trade and technology. Social inclusion and change-change in...

This paper examines the roles of bank capital regulation and monetary policy in mitigating procyclicality and promoting macroeconomic and financial stability. The analysis is based on a dynamic stochastic model with imperfect credit markets. Macroeconomic (financial) stability is defined in...

This paper proposes a working definition for “financial stability” related to systemic risk. Systemic risk is then measured as the probability of disruption of financial services taking into account its time and cross-sectional dimensions and several risk factors. The paper discusses the...

This paper applies and extends a theoretical model built by Agénor and Montiel (2007) by exploring the effectiveness of government bonds and monetary policy in a small, open, credit-based economy with a fixed exchange rate. The model is applied to Benin, a member of a currency union, using a...

The experience of developing countries over 1990-2010 indicates that commodity prices have a significant impact on fiscal outcomes. Both revenue and expenditure rise in response to commodity (import or export) price increases; the response of the fiscal deficit is ambiguous. A floating exchange...

Trade and financial ties between low-income countries (LICs) and Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRICs) have expanded rapidly in recent years. This gives rise to the potential for growth to spill over from the latter to the former. We employ a global vector autoregression (GVAR) model to...

This paper presents counterfactual decompositions based on both the Shapley method and a generalization of the Oaxaca-Blinder approach to identify proximate factors that might explain differences in the distribution of economic welfare in Cameroon in 1996-2007. In particular, the analysis uses...

The international community has declared poverty reduction one of the fundamental objectives of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of development interventions. This creates the need for a sound understanding of the fundamental factors that account for observed...