In recent years, the South Caucasus and Central Asia countries (CCA-6) have received significant foreign exchange inflows. While a healthy reserve buffer is desirable to selfinsure against external crises, holding international reserves also involves costs. We analyze the adequacy of CCA-6...

We analyse the debt dynamics in countries that benefited from the HIPC/MDRI debt relief initiatives with a view to applying a probabilistic approach to estimating future debt paths for those countries. We extend the probabilistic approach to public debt sustainability analysis (DSA) proposed by...

Concentrated distribution of international reserves is puzzling. I show that the growth rates of international reserves bear only a very weak relationship to their initial stocks (scaled by GDP or in absolute terms), and that, by implication, the cross-sectional distribution of reserves conforms...

The report is part of the continued investigation on the public-private investment relationship, and its focus for this year is on the quality of public investment, its interaction with corruption, and the resulting impact on private investment. The first chapter provides statistics on trends in...

This discussion paper examines in its first part, the role of private investment in economic growth. While theoretical growth models developed in the economics literature, make no distinction between private, and public components of investment, there is an emerging appreciation that private...

This is the tenth annual edition of "Trends in Private Investment in Developing Countries." To mark this event, this report includes figures for each of the countries for which data are available as well as the first country-specific results of a worldwide survey on obstacles to doing business...

Private investment in developing countries continued its upward trend in 1996, the most recent year for which data exist, on an unweighted average basis. Public investment rates continued a decline that began in the early 1980s. The largest increases in private investment between 1995 and 1996...

This short paper, in its eighth edition, provides private and public investment data through 1995. Although the growing empirical literature on privatization has almost invariably found that the transfer of assets from public to private hands yields both efficiency and welfare gains, there has...

This is the seventh annual edition of "Trends in Private Investment in Developing Countries", a unique data source. In addition to presenting the latest statistics the present edition focuses on international financing flows. It also expands and updates analysis of the determinants of private...