This paper discusses Congo’s Request for an Extension for the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). The extension will provide additional time for the completion of the fifth review under the PRGF. The review was delayed owing to slippages in the second half of 2004 that had led...

This paper focuses on Ex Post Assessment of Longer-Term Program Engagement for Guinea. Guinea’s stabilization and reform efforts have been almost continuously supported by IMF financial arrangements since 1987. The paper reviews developments under the last two IMF-supported programs...

This Selected Issues paper on the United Kingdom reviews the IMF's Global Economy Model, which incorporates energy to examine the impact of rising energy prices on the United Kingdom. The model incorporates energy as a final consumption good as well as a primary input in the production process....

This 2005 Article IV Consultation highlights that Zimbabwe’s pace of economic deterioration slowed somewhat in 2004, but appears to have picked up again in the first half of 2005. IMF staff estimates that real GDP fell by about 4 percent in 2004, compared with a contraction of 10½...

This 2004 Article IV Consultation highlights that tighter fiscal and monetary policies in Suriname helped stabilize the exchange rate and moderate inflation pressures in 2003 and 2004. The fiscal deficit narrowed from 6.5 percent of GDP in 2002 to near balance in 2003, while a tighter monetary...

The paper analyzes the question why the U.S. economy in the 2000:4-2004:3 period was sluggish in light of the large expansionary fiscal and monetary policies that took place. The answer does not appear to be that there were large structural changes in the economy or systematic bad shocks. This...

This paper looks at a broad array of evidence concerning the recent boom in home prices, and considers what this means for future home prices and the economy. It does not appear possible to explain the boom in terms of fundamentals such as rents or construction costs. A psychological theory,...

Expectations play a central role in modern macroeconomic theories. The econometric learning approach models economic agents as forming expectations by estimating and updating forecasting models in real time. The learning approach provides a stability test for rational expectations and a...

We show that if policy-makers compute the optimal unconstrained interest-rate rule within a Taylor-type class, they may be led to rules that generate indeterminacy and/or instability under learning. This problem is compounded by uncertainty about structural parameters since an optimal rule that...

Forward-looking monetary models with Taylor-type interest rate rules are known to generate indeterminacies, with a potential dependence on extraneous "sunspots," for some structural and policy parameters. We investigate the stability of these solutions under adaptive learning, focusing on...