This Selected Issues paper analyzes the main factors underlying the evolution of competitiveness, export performance, and labor market developments in Poland. The paper seeks to identify key questions of relevance for policymaking. The overall evolution of competitiveness compared with...

This paper discusses Bangladesh’s Second Review Under the Three-Year Arrangement Under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) and Requests for Waiver of Performance Criteria. Bangladesh’s macroeconomic policies have been prudent. December 2003 quantitative targets and...

Exchange rate pass-through in a set of euro area prices along the pricing chain is examined. Using a vector autoregression (VAR) approach, the empirics analyze the joint time-series behavior of the euro exchange rate and a system of euro-area prices in response to an exchange rate shock. The...

This paper reviews the evolution of China's real effective exchange rate between 1980 and 2002, and uses a structural vector autoregression model to study the relative importance of different types of macroeconomic shocks for fluctuations in the real exchange rate. The structural decomposition...

The high priority recommendations from the data report on the observance of standards and codes mission covered both general and sector-specific issues relating to the national accounts, consumer and producer price indices, government finance statistics, monetary statistics, and...

This paper finds that the estimates of Armington elasticities (the elasticity of substitution between groups of products identified by country of origin) obtained from multilateral trade data can differ from those obtained from bilateral trade data. In particular, the former tends to be higher...

China’s transformation into a dynamic private-sector-led economy and its integration into the world economy have been among the most dramatic global economic developments of recent decades. This paper provides an overview of some of the key aspects of recent developments in China’s...

Australia’s 2004 Article IV Consultation reports that economic growth has rebounded, underpinned by continued buoyancy of domestic demand, an improvement in the external environment, and a gradual recovery from the drought. The main risk to the outlook relates to overheating in the...