Real GDP per capita and capital stock in Cote d'Ivoire grew strongly from 1960 to 1979, but have declined ever since, for twenty-five years. As a result, the country has traveled a full circle from economic success to failure in little more than a generation. What are the long-term factors...

Key economic variables in Cote d'Ivoire vary widely from their long-run trends, moving in multi-year cyclical patterns. Cocoa prices move with cycles in growth rates, capital stock, real exchange rates, terms of trade, cocoa production, and coffee production and output. These patterns have...

This paper explores competitiveness of Cote d'Ivoire's economy over a long period of 1960-2003 and its link with cocoa prices. The main conclusions are as follows. First, using four measures of real effective exchange rate (REER) for the 1960-2002 period, we track the evolution of REER and...

Efforts aimed at supporting domestic revenue mobilization in developing countries are often designed and evaluated based on empirical indicators, such as revenue-to-GDP ratios, which capture differences in achieved outcomes across countries. This paper studies a complementary approach to...

Dollarisation is becoming a viable option for a number of countries, but the potential loss of seigniorage is a major obstacle. The paper reviews existing seigniorage sharing arrangements and discusses issues in the design of the new ones

This paper provides an analysis of the export potential and export diversification of Montenegro using the export-product space approach pioneered by Hausmann, Hwang, and Rodrik (2007), Hausmann and Klinger (2006), and Hidalgo, et. al. (2007). Based on this analysis as well as a review of...

The empirical analysis of Bulgaria's income distribution and income tax burden indicates that the country has low income inequality although this is changing rapidly. The income tax is progressive and contributes significantly to reducing income inequality, and the urban sector pays...