High levels of economic policy uncertainty in various parts of the world revamped the de- bate about its impact on economic activity. With increasingly stronger economic, financial, and political ties among countries, economic agents have more reasons to be vigilant of for- eign economic policy....

Sound regional policies are essential for balanced and sustained economic growth. The interaction of federal and regional policies with cross-regional structural differences affect human and physical capital formation, the business climate, private investment, market depth, and competition. This...

The decline in oil prices in 2014-16 was one of the sharpest in history, and put to test the resilience of oil exporters. We examine the degree to which economic fundamentals entering the oil price decline explain the impact on economic growth across oil exporting economies, and derive policy...

Poor performance of the electricity sector remains a drag to economic efficiency and a bottleneck to economic activity in many low-income countries. This paper proposes a number of models that account for different equilibria (some better, some worse) of the electricity sector. They show how...

A well-organized and effective finance ministry and its associated central finance agencies (CFAs) are essential to good fiscal outcomes. Recent studies of CFAs in selected low-income countries demonstrate that their organizational structure varies widely and that decision making on public...

In the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a version of a Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). These are budget institutions whose rationale it is to enable the central government to make credible multi-year fiscal commitments. This paper analyzes a newly-collected dataset...