This paper examines capital account policy choices in an innovative model with adaptive learning under uncertainty. In the model, countries’ past experiences and IMF programs influence policymakers’ beliefs about impact of capital account liberalization on growth, taking into account...

The heightened interest of African countries to access international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continent’s policy agenda. Applying the ‘stabilizing primary balance approach’ to sustainability shows that the primary balances exceeded those...

Drawing on the 2007 and 2010 Swaziland Labor Force Surveys, this paper provides first systematic evidence on recent youth employment challenges in Swaziland, a small, land-locked, middle-income country with one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Africa. The paper first documents the...

The objective of this paper is to discuss macroeconomic policies that would help African countries, especially the low income countries, reach strong, sustained and shared growth in the post-crisis world. The paper first reviews, with a special focus on LICs, macroeconomic policies in Africa...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms. In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paper presents a...

Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

Purpose – The Maastricht inflation criterion has influenced the choice of disinflation strategies of prospective euro area member countries. Some historically high-inflation countries chose the fiat disinflation strategy of “low inflation now, reforms later,” bringing inflation down...