This paper reviews Lebanon''s ability to manage financial pressures following severe shocks despite its large public debt overhang and significant external vulnerabilities. Based on interviews with market participants in Beirut and London, the paper concludes that Lebanon''s ability to weather...

This paper reviews Lebanon's ability to manage financial pressures following severe shocks despite its large public debt overhang and significant external vulnerabilities. Based on interviews with market participants in Beirut and London, the paper concludes that Lebanon's ability to weather...

This paper applies a simple probabilistic approach to debt sustainability analysis to the case of Lebanon. The paper derives ""fan charts"" to depict the probability distribution of the government debt to GDP ratio under a medium-term adjustment scenario, as a result of shocks to GDP growth and...

The population of the Middle East and North Africa is one of the fastest growing in the world, but jobs have not grown as fast as the region’s workforce. This paper addresses questions such as""Can current GDP growth generate more employment, or will higher GDP growth be required?""and ""Will...

Using data for advanced economies, this paper investigates whether factors identified in the theoretical and empirical literature explain the effectiveness of fiscal policy in responding to recessions. The results are informative about the fiscal response to recessions but provide only a partial...

The macroeconomic implications of a pension reform that substitutes a high-return fully-funded system for a low-return pay-as-you-go system are discussed in an overlapping generations, neoclassical growth model. With forward-looking individuals, a debt-financed reform worsens the current...

We develop an early-warning model of sovereign debt crises. A country is defined to be in a debt crisis if it is classified as being in default by Standard & Poor''s, or if it has access to nonconcessional IMF financing in excess of 100 percent of quota. By means of logit and binary recursive...

This paper applies a simple probabilistic approach to debt sustainability analysis to the case of Lebanon. The paper derives quot;fan chartsquot; to depict the probability distribution of the government debt to GDP ratio under a medium-term adjustment scenario, as a result of shocks to GDP...

We question the conventional view that it is optimal for government to maintain a stable level of spending out of oil wealth. We compare this conventional policy recommendation with one where government spends all of its oil revenues upfront, at the same rate as oil is extracted. Using a...

This paper applies a simple probabilistic approach to debt sustainability analysis to the case of Lebanon. The paper derives "fan charts" to depict the probability distribution of the government debt to GDP ratio under a medium-term adjustment scenario, as a result of shocks to GDP growth and...