This paper assesses the macroeconomic implications of scaling up aid for Benin in line with the Gleneagles commitment to double aid to poor countries over the next three years to reach $85 per capita by 2010 and keep it at that level thereafter. The analysis suggests that the additional aid...

Inadequate infrastructure has been widely viewed as a principal barrier to growth and development in Latin America and the Caribbean. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of infrastructure in the region and highlights key areas in which infrastructure networks can be enhanced. The public...

The oil price decline creates an opportunity to dismantle energy subsidies, which escalated with high oil prices. This paper assesses energy subsidies in Latin America and the Caribbean — about 1.8 percent of GDP in 2011-13 (approximately evenly split between fuel and electricity), and about...

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...

The past several years of recession and slow recovery have raised much interest on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity, even as high public debts in many countries would call for fiscal consolidation. To evaluate the delicate balance between stimulus and consolidation requires...

This paper assesses the implications of the use of oil revenue for public investment on growth and fiscal sustainability in Cameroon. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of such investment on growth and on the path of key fiscal indicators, such as...

The past several years of recession and slow recovery have raised much interest on the effect of fiscal stimulus on economic activity, even as high public debts in many countries would call for fiscal consolidation. To evaluate the delicate balance between stimulus and consolidation requires...

We investigate the nexus of public and private investment and assess the impact of both types of investment on growth. Using annual data for 1965-2005, we employ a coherent set of structural VAR outputs to model investment and growth in Benin. We find that in addition to institutional and...

This paper examines the sustainability of fiscal policy under uncertainty in three emerging market countries, Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey. For each country, we estimate a vector autoregression (VAR) that includes fiscal and macroeconomic variables. Retrospectively, a historical decomposition...

This paper assesses the macroeconomic implications of scaling up aid for Benin in line with the Gleneagles commitment to double aid to poor countries over the next three years to reach $85 per capita by 2010 and keep it at that level thereafter. The analysis suggests that the additional aid...