The recent recovery in Latin America has been impressive but also raises the question whether this represents a fundamental break with the region's history of boom-bust cycles. The paper traces how this history of macroeconomic volatility and financial crisis over the past century has adversely...

This 2003 Article IV Consultation highlights that Israel’s economy has entered a modest recovery path, after almost three years of recession. Led by external demand, real GDP is estimated to have grown 1.3 percent in 2003, despite anemic investment. Furthermore, high frequency indicators...

The interest rate-growth differential (IRGD) shows a marked correlation with GDP per capita. It has been on average around 1 percentage point for large advanced economies during 1999-2008; but below -7 percentage points among non-advanced economies - exerting a powerful stabilizing influence on...

Since the 2008 financial crisis burst, public finance accounts in developed economies have been continuously deteriorating; both fiscal and monetary policies are reaching their limits, while unemployment rates are soaring and GDP growth is fragile, if not inexistent. The aim of this article is...

This paper considers the consequences of international financial market integration for national fiscal and monetary policies that derive from the absence of an international sovereign authority to define and enforce contractual obligations across borders. The sovereign immunity of national...

We develop a new public domestic debt (DD) database covering 93 low-income countries and emerging markets over the 1975-2004 period to estimate the growth impact of DD. Moderate levels of non-inflationary DD, as a share of GDP and bank deposits, are found to exert a positive overall impact on...