Fiscal performance in Latin America looks much improved this decade compared to the 1980s or 1990s. Is this a ""structural"" improvement or likely to be transitory? This paper answers this question by estimating the relationship between non-commodity revenue and the economic cycle, and...

We identify structural breaks in economic growth in 140 countries and use these to define ""growth spells:"" periods of high growth preceded by an upbreak and ending either with a downbreak or with the end of the sample. Growth spells tend to be shorter in African and Latin American countries...

We present a framework that clarifies the financial role of the IMF, the rationale for conditionality, and the conditions under which IMF-induced moral hazard can arise. In the model, traditional conditionality commits country authorities to undertake crisis resolution efforts, facilitating the...

This paper estimates equilibrium dollar wages for 15 transition economies. Equilibrium dollar wages are interpreted as full employment wages consistent with a country’s physical and human capital endowment, and estimated by regressing actual dollar wages on productivity and human capital...

What are the relative roles of macroeconomic variables, structural policies, and initial conditions in explaining the time path of output in transition and the large observed differences in output performance across transition economies? Using a sample of 26 countries, this paper follows a...

We compute realized transfers implicit in IMF lending from 1973-2003, based on 2003 IMF repayment projections and promised debt relief. IMF lending rates to high-and middleincome countries fell short of industrial country borrowing rates by 30-150 basis points over the period as a whole, but...

The debate on government debt in the context of possible reforms of the international financial architecture has thus far focused on crisis resolution. This paper seeks to broaden this debate. It asks how government debt could be structured to pursue other objectives, including crisis...

Between 1991 and 1999, capital flows to 25 transition economies in Europe and the former Soviet Union differed widely in terms of overall levels and the share and composition of private flows. With some exceptions (notably Russia), the main form of private inflows was foreign direct investment....

We identify structural breaks in economic growth in 140 countries and use these to define ""growth spells:"" periods of high growth preceded by an upbreak and ending either with a downbreak or with the end of the sample. Growth spells tend to be shorter in African and Latin American countries...

This paper surveys early intellectual antecedents of the Krueger (2001) proposal for creating bankruptcy reorganization procedures at the international level. We focus on actual proposals for new procedures made from the late 1970s up to an influential lecture by Sachs (1995), with brief...