This paper examines financial sector reforms in eight developing countries--Argentina, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda--and derives general lessons from their experience. The paper reviews the initial situation of these countries; describes the financial sector (and...

Evaluations of European monetary integration using model simulations have given conflicting results, and the paper attempts to elucidate the reasons for the differences. Several features stand out: how to model realignments; how monetary policy is set for individual countries or for Europe; and...

This paper examines the question: Who bears the larger portion of the excess burden of a tariff-the country that imposes it, or a country that it trades with? For a country that can influence its terms of trade, there are two ways of approaching this question. This paper shows that under certain...

This paper develops the theoretical background for the Limited Information Bayesian Model Averaging (LIBMA). The proposed approach accounts for model uncertainty by averaging over all possible combinations of predictors when making inferences about the variables of interest, and it...

The paper investigates empirically the determinants of economic growth for a large sample of sub-Saharan African countries during 1981-92. The results indicate that (i) an increase in private investment has a relatively large positive impact on per capita growth; (ii) growth is stimulated by...

The primary mandate of a national Treasury is to promote an optimal financial management of government resources, by ensuring that spending agencies are provided, in a timely manner, the resources needed for a smooth provision of public services, while minimizing the cost of government...

This paper looks at the dramatic decline in global real interest rates in recent years from a historical perspective and examines the various factors that may account for this trend. We show that current levels of real interest rates on long-term bonds in advanced economies are not low by...

The common-pool problem is a central issue in the relationship between the political structure of jurisdictions and the size of public spending. Models predict that, other things being equal, greater political districting of a jurisdiction raises the scale of government. This paper presents new...

This paper estimates a disequilibrium model of credit supply and demand to evaluate whether there was a credit crunch in Finland following the banking crisis of 1991-92. Empirical analysis suggests that the marked reduction in bank lending was mainly in reaction to a cyclical decline in credit...

We survey the literature on the two main views of exchange rate determination that have evolved since the early 1970s: the monetary approach to the exchange rate (in flex-price, sticky-price and real interest differential formulations) and the portfolio balance approach. We then go on to discuss...