This paper provides a framework for understanding trade patterns in the Mashreq. An augmented gravity model is used to compare actual with expected levels of trade. Trade barriers, political uncertainty, and over-appreciation of domestic currencies seem to explain low levels of international...

Following the adoption by the international community of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach, which provides the basis for concessional lending by the multilateral institutions, there has been a resurgence of interest in the poverty and social impact analysis (PSIA) of different...

This paper examines the relationship between rent seeking and economic performance when governments cannot enforce property rights. With imperfect credit markets and a fixed cost of rent seeking, only wealthy agents choose to engage in it, since it enables them to protect their wealth from...

This paper uses a Merton-type estimate of the probability of default (PoD) for the main banks in a sample of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and middle-income countries as a proxy for the fragility of their banking systems. Based on theory and stylized facts, the paper...

This paper computes Malawi's equilibrium real exchange rate as a function of its fundamentals as derived from economic theory. It finds evidence in favor of the equilibrium approach to exchange rate determination, with several variables (particularly government consumption and real per capita...

The natural interest rate is of great relevance to central banks, but it is difficult to measure. We show that in a standard microfounded monetary model, the natural interest rate co-moves with a transformation of the money demand that can be computed from actual data. The co-movement is of a...

In this paper we are presenting an analysis of shift of tax burden from income onto consumption. The analyzed consumption tax is value added tax, while destination principle is applied. The result of analysis is finding that the contemporary tax policy in the Czech Republic is suboptimal from...

In order to answer the pertinent question why developing countries are showing penchant for foreign capital over the last two decades in spite of its detrimental effects as revealed from the conventional two-sector mobile capital version of Harris–Todaro (HT) model in the presence of...

Quantitative policy analysts are usually confronted with the problem to derive a base-line scenario that reflects the most likely state of an economy in a future year. The methods used in practice to derive such a base-line scenarios are heterogeneous and range from the usage of the last...