'Wising Up to the Costs of Aging' looks at how falling fertility and rising life expectancy have combined to threaten the ability of many countries to provide a decent standard of living for the old without imposing a crushing burden on the young. In our lead article, Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason...

The Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) is the cenerpiece of the International Monetary Fund's strategy to provide assistance on concessional terms to low-income member countries that are undertaking important macroeconomic adjustment and stuctural reforms. By February 1999, a total...

Edited by Zubair Iqbal and Ravi Kanbur, this volume consists of papers presented at a joint IMF and World Bank conference on external financing for low-income countries. The primary focus was on the impact of external indebtedness on low-income countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, the HIPC...

The 14 papers that comprise this book, edited by Ke-young Chu and Sanjeev Gupta, provide a comprehensive review of the IMF's work on social safety nets. Part I provides a broad overview of the social concerns in structural policy and the basic work related to social safety nets. Part II deals...

This paper reports an updated assessment of movements in official financing for developing countries during 1997-1999. The composition of official financing flows changed too; as a result of the Asian crisis Member states of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) increased official...

Over the past few decades, a clear trend has emerged worldwide toward the devolution of spending and, to a lesser extent, revenue-raising responsibilities to state and local levels of government. One view is that the decentralization of spending responsibilities can entail substantial gains in...

Assessing a country''s competitiveness routinely starts with an analysis of the real exchange rate. However, in low-income countries, empirical analysis of the real exchange rate is often subject to important limitations that seriously weaken the results. This paper summarizes the methodologies...

This paper develops a new index which provides early warning signals of a growth crisis in the event of large external shocks in low-income countries. Multivariate regression analysis and a univariate signaling approach are used to map information from a parsimonious set of underlying policy,...

This paper attempts to assess the incremental external financing requirements occasioned by changes in world food prices, due to implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, for a sample of 57 developing countries. Based on estimates of changes in food prices due to the Round...

We develop a semi-structural new-Keynesian open-economy model, with separate food and non-food inflation dynamics, for forecasting and monetary policy analysis in low-income countries and apply it to Kenya. We use the model to run several policy-relevant exercises. First, we filter international...