High and volatile inflation has been an endemic economic and social issue in Iran that has contributed to rising poverty and social tensions. For policymakers to effectively address the inflation problem, it is critical to understand its causes. This paper seeks to contribute to this endeavor by...

Bolivia has achieved noteworthy success over the past 15 years in raising incomes, reducing poverty, and maintaining macroeconomic stability by deploying commodity revenues to finance transfers, public investment, and state-led development, using an exchange rate peg as a policy anchor. However,...

This article documents recent developments in emerging markets in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assesses their prospects and challenges, and discusses appropriate policy settings for the medium term. It argues that EM policymakers’ ability to grapple with an incomplete and uneven...

The Morocco Policy Analysis model (MOPAM) was created in the Bank Al-Maghrib to simulate the impact of external developments, domestic macroeconomic policies, and structural reforms on key macroeconomic aggregates. We describe its structure and demonstrate its operation on two medium-term...

Public and private sector balance sheets are an important component to any analysis of debt sustainability. A vulnerable and indebted private sector can become a sudden liability for the government; alternatively, resilient household and bank balance sheets may reveal potential sources of...

South Asia needs large infrastructure investments to achieve its development goals, and public investment can also support the Covid-19 recovery. Regression estimates that account for the quantity and quality of investment suggest that public infrastructure was a key driver of productivity...

This paper examines ways to summarize the maturity structure of public debts using a small number of parameters. We compile a novel dataset of all promised future payments for US and UK government debt from every month since 1869, and more recently for Peru, Poland, Egypt, and Nigeria. We show...

The paper describes a semistructural macrofiscal approach to simulating and forecasting macroeconomic policies. The model focuses on only a few variables that are consistent with the New Keynesian framework. Thanks to its simplicity, it facilitates an initial and intuitive understanding of...

Do governments in Latin America tend to be optimistic when preparing budgetary projections? We address this question by constructing a novel dataset of the authorities’ fiscal forecasts in six Latin American economies using data from annual budget documents over the period 2000-2018. In turn,...

This paper investigates the performance of fiscal rules in resource-rich countries (RRC). Using panel data for 57 commodity exporting countries from 1976 to 2021, we find that fiscal rules: (i) reduce the procyclicality of real public expenditures with terms of trade in oil exporting countries,...