The world is currently still struggling with the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Following a description of the eruption, evolution and consequences of the global crisis, this paper reviews alternative hypotheses for the causes of the global financial crisis as...

Access to debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative enhanced the growth performance across Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the subset of debt-ridden low-income countries. Over the past few years, these Completion Point countries have enjoyed significantly higher investments...

Traditional narratives of external imbalances have focused on the analysis of national accounts, trade flows, and financial flows. They have generated two opposing views of the current situation of the world economy: on one side, a prudent, if not pessimistic view considers large imbalances as...

Management of international monetary relations between China and the United States will be one of the crucial parameters for the stability or instability of the global financial system in the next decade. Although most of the literature suggests rebalancing through either adjustment of relative...

This paper shows that real exchange rate undervaluation through the accumulation of foreign reserves may improve welfare in economies with learning-by-investing externalities that arise disproportionately from the tradable sector. In the presence of targeting problems or when policy choices are...

This paper applies a growth diagnostics approach to identify the most binding constraints to private-sector growth in Malawi - a small, landlocked country in Southern Africa with one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world. The approach aims to identify the constraints (in terms of public...

Trade, financial, and exchange rate reforms are shown to have exerted a positive impact on the growth of total factor productivity in Rwanda during the period 1995-2003. Based on a constant returns-to-scale Cobb-Douglas production function, this paper regresses total factor productivity on...

This paper contributes to the predominant diversification debate that has been ongoing in Trinidad and Tobago for more than three decades. The paper makes a determination of the key impediments to the country's attempts at diversification. Econometric techniques are applied on panel data to...

This paper explores how the ongoing crisis, the policy responses to it, and the post-crisis global economy will impact China's medium-term prospects for growth, poverty reduction, and development. The paper reviews China's pre-crisis growth experience, including its relationship to global...

The nature of the microeconomic frictions that transform sudden stops in output collapses is not only of academic interest, but also crucial for the correct design of policy responses to prevent and address these episodes and the lack of evidence on this regard is an important shortcoming. This...