Japan showed strong economic recovery from the crisis. Executive Directors welcomed the development and stressed the need for a strong monetary framework, well-designed fiscal consolidation, and structural reforms. Directors agreed that the Bank of Japan’s monetary framework is well...

Staff Report for the 2012 Article IV consultation, prepared by a staff team of the IMF, following discussions that ended on October 2, with the officials of Croatia on economic developments and policies. Based on information available at the time of these discussions, the staff report was...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix on Bhutan underlie the macroeconomic impact of Tala, rapid private sector credit growth, and macroeconomic risks. In Bhutan, as the bulk of Tala-related flows go through the government accounts, this requires an appropriate fiscal stance and...

This Selected Issues paper aims to present a medium-term reform strategy that could be pursued by Libya to accelerate its transition to a market economy. The paper reviews the main characteristics of the Libyan economy, and medium-term prospects under current policies. It examines the priority...

This paper analyzes the 2005 Article IV Consultation and First Review Under the Staff-Monitored Program (SMP) for the Union of the Comoros. Economic growth remained lackluster in 2004 owing to a depressed world demand for vanilla and crop, and cattle diseases. Government revenue stagnated, while...

This paper focuses on two central issues related to the contrasting experiences of Malaysia and Pakistan regarding poverty reduction. First, it examines the structure of economic growth and its proximate determinants in the two countries, including the initial conditions, institutional changes,...

This paper considers the effects of trade policy-tariffs and quotas-when importing is done by competitive traders who are identical ex ante but differ ex post. We show that the standard equivalence results no longer hold and the conventional ranking of tariffs and quotas is turned on its head:...

In this paper, the IMF's new Global Economy Model (GEM) is used to estimate the contribution of unbalanced growth to the decline in the share of goods production in Australia and New Zealand. The simulation results suggest that faster productivity growth in the tradable goods sector in...

China’s transformation into a dynamic private-sector-led economy and its integration into the world economy have been among the most dramatic global economic developments of recent decades. This paper provides an overview of some of the key aspects of recent developments in China’s...