Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

Latvia’s economy continues to recover, but the worsening global outlook is likely to hurt growth. Implementation of the program has made the economy more robust to shocks, but risks remain that could derail the recovery and the goal of euro adoption. Spillovers from the euro area crisis...

This Selected Issues paper focuses on fiscal policy and financial linkages across banks in Qatar. The paper presents main stylized facts on the evolution of revenues and expenditures and the relationship with oil prices. It analyzes the evolution of the fiscal policy stance in the run-up to and...

This Selected Issues paper examines Kenya’s growth performance during 1980–2004. It considers the stylized facts on Kenya’s growth performance in the past two decades, in comparison with other Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper examines main sources of economic growth...

The typical behaviour of EU Member States over the past decades has been to spend more public money than revenue earned by the government to finance programs with more or less important impact on society. Budget deficits and public debt have become important issues for EU countries, especially...

According to the 2018 Mercer Global Pension index, the pension systems of Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are the best three in the world. This paper seeks to identify the common elements of success of these three pension systems, including the institutional framework within which they...

This paper develops a framework to decompose the change in New Zealand's public debt ratio into four component effects: the primary balance, real GDP growth, real interest rates, and exchange rates. We study New Zealand's debt dynamics over three periods: the decade after the Global Financial...

This paper analyzes the impact of monetary policy on public debt sustainability through the lens of a general equilibrium model with fiscal limits. We find that the mere possibility of a binding ZLB may have detrimental effects on debt sustainability, as a kink in the Laffer curve induces a...