Analyzes the costs and benefits of full dollarization, or the adoption by one country of another country’s currency. Potential advantages include lower borrowing costs and deeper integration into world markets. But countries lose the ability to devalue, and become dependent on the U.S....

Recent years have witnessed an increase in the frequency of currency and balance of payments crises in developing countries. More important, the crises have become more virulent, have caused widespread disruption to other developing countries, and have even had repercussions on advanced...

The Fund has recognized in recent years that one cannot separate issues of economic growth and stability on one hand and equality on the other. Indeed, there is a strong case for considering inequality and an inability to sustain economic growth as two sides of the same coin. Central to the...

In a recent paper, Bai and Perron (2006) demonstrate that their approach for testing for multiple structural breaks in time series works well in large samples, but they found substantial deviations in both the size and power of their tests in smaller samples. We propose modifying their...

This note raises the IMF's profile on a number of issues related to inequality, unemployment, governance, et cetera It builds on earlier empirical work that examined correlations between growth downbreaks/duration of growth spells and a range of macro/policy/institutional factors. This paper is...

El FMI ha reconocido en anos recientes que no es posible separar cuestiones como el crecimiento y la estabilidad economica, por un lado, y la igualdad, por el otro. De hecho, se puede argumentar con fuerza que la desigualdad y la incapacidad para sustentar el crecimiento economico son dos caras...

The global financial crisis poses significant challenges to fiscal policies in Sub-Saharan African countries. Growth will weaken considerably as export prices and volumes, remittances, tourism, and capital flows decline. The fiscal effects of the crisis are likely to be large and to operate...

The integration of financial markets around the world over the past decade has posed new challenges for policymakers. The speed with which money can be switched in and out of currencies and countries has increased with the efficiency of global communications, considerably shortening the time...

En esta nota se presenta el enfoque del FMI con respecto a una serie de cuestiones relacionadas con la desigualdad, el desempleo, la gestión de gobierno, etc. Se basa en estudios empíricos anteriores que examinan las correlaciones entre las desaceleraciones del crecimiento/la duración de las...