This paper discusses key findings of the Fourth Review Under the Stand–By Arrangement for Belarus. All end-December quantitative and continuous performance criteria and structural benchmarks were met. Discussions focused on confirming the authorities’ commitment to program...

This Selected Issues paper assesses the impact of Vietnam’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession. It describes the main terms of Vietnam’s accession as regards trade in goods and services, and uses a partial equilibrium simulation model to estimate the likely impact of WTO...

This paper empirically evaluates the degree of integration among spatially separated markets using monthly wholesale real price series of tomato and onion from regional markets located in each of the four provinces of Pakistan. Unit root test indicates that the price series are stationary, and...

The staff report for the 2008 Article IV Consultation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia discusses economic developments and policies. The new government’s economic program aims to raise growth further, but does not address these vulnerabilities. Plans to increase the central...

Central America has received growing attention as a region that is integrating successfully into the global economy. This paper examines—among other things—the macroeconomic and fiscal implications of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA-DR), noting that the...

A self-exciting threshold autoregressive model is used to measure transaction costs that may explain relative price differentials and nonlinearities in the behavior of sectoral real exchange rates across Mexico, Canada and the U.S. Interpreting price threshold bands as transactions costs, we...

Recently, the export performance of France relative to its own past and relative to a major trading partner, Germany, deteriorated. That deterioration seems related to the geographical destination and product composition of trend exports. Faced with an increase in unit labor costs or in its...

The role of exchange rate flexibility in the periphery of the gold standard has been grossly overlooked. This paper builds a new dataset on trade-weighed exchange rates for the period 1870-1913 and finds that large currency movements in periphery countries operating inconvertible paper-money and...

The member countries of the International Monetary Fund collaborate to try to assure orderly exchange arrangements and promote a stable system of exchange rates, recognizing that the essential purpose of the international monetary system is to facilitate the exchange of goods, services, and...