Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to developing countries surged in the 1990s to become their leading source of external financing. This rise in FDI volume was accompanied by a marked change in its composition: investment taking the form of acquisition of existing assets (mergers and...

An adequate supply of infrastructure services has long been viewed by both academics and policy makers as a key ingredient for economic development. Sub-Saharan Africa ranks consistently at the bottom of all developing regions in terms of infrastructure performance, and an increasing number of...

This paper offers an empirical evaluation of the output contribution of infrastructure. Drawing from a large data set on infrastructure stocks covering 88 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000, and using a panel time-series approach, the paper estimates a long-run aggregate production...

An adequate supply of infrastructure services has long been viewed by both academics and policy makers as a key ingredient for economic development. Over the past quarter-century, the retrenchment of Latin America's public sector from its dominant position in the provision of infrastructure, and...

The authors consider external sustainability from the perspective of equilibrium in net foreign asset positions. Under their approach, an external situation is sustainable if it is consistent with international and domestic investors'achieving their desired portfolio allocation across countries....

Advanced and emerging market economies have rapidly integrated into international capital markets and this growing globalization of financial markets has led to some important changes in the patterns of saving and investment across the world. The main goal of this paper is to test whether the...

Using the dating algorithm by Harding and Pagan (2002) on a quarterly database for 23 emerging market economies (EMEs) and 12 developed countries over the period 1980.Q1 - 2006.Q2, the authors proceed to characterize and compare the business cycle features of these two groups. They first find...

This paper investigates how government interventions into banking systems such as blanket guarantees, liquidity support, recapitalizations, and nationalizations affect banking competition. This debate is important because the pricing of banking products has implications for borrower and...

Africa's Pulse is a biannual publication containing an analysis of the near-term macroeconomic outlook forthe region. Each issue also includes a section focusing upon a topic that represents a particular developmentchallenge for the continent. It is produced by the Office of the Chief Economist...

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to have decelerated from 2.5 percent in 2017 to 2.3percent in 2018, below the rate of growth of population for a fourth consecutive year. Regional growth in2018 is below the pace projected in 2018 October issue of Africa's Pulse {0.4 percentage...