This Selected Issues paper reviews the economic development in the Philippines during the 1990s. Growth, which virtually came to a halt in the early 1990s, picked up in 1993 and accelerated steadily to almost 7 percent by end-1996, fueled by an expansion in exports and investment. At the same...

With the exception of Burkina Faso and Mali, the growth experience for WAEMU countries has been disappointing, even when compared to other sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The main objective of the paper is to investigate why the quest for a growth takeoff has been more elusive in the WAEMU...

Despite the rapid increase in FDI flows to LICs, there have been relatively few studies that have specifically examined these flows. This paper attempts to partially fill the void by throwing light on one particularly dynamic aspect of global FDI-flows from Brazil, Russia, India and China...

The September 2011 edition of the World Economic Outlook assesses the prospects for the global economy, which is now in a dangerous new phase. Global activity has weakened and become more uneven, confidence has fallen sharply recently, and downside risks are growing. Against a backdrop of...

The financial press frequently suggest that the shape of yield curve reflects information about the prospects of the economy. This paper attempts to formalize the link between the yield curve and the real economic activity. A closed-form formula for the term structure of interest rates is...

The IMF MULTIMOD model is used to trace the economic impact of a 20 percent reduction in world military expenditures. GDP falls in the short run, however private consumption and investment rise, leading to an increase in GDP in the medium and long run. The estimated gains to economic welfare are...

With the emergence of the rapidly expanding literature on endogenous growth, the relationship between financial development and economic growth has received a new source of inspiration. Recent cointegration techniques that focus on the estimation and the identification of long-run economic...

This Selected Issues paper on the Philippines reviews the diminished volatility of the Republic of Philippines bonds (RoPs), even through a period of extended turbulence cannot be attributed solely to the sanguine global factors currently prevailing across all credit markets. Considerable fiscal...

This paper studies large reductions in current account deficits and exchange rate depreciations in low- and middle-income countries. It examines which factors help predict the occurrence of a reversal or a currency crisis, and how these events affect macroeconomic performance. Both domestic...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital...