We develop a theoretical model that shows that in the near future, the monetary policies of some key central banks in advanced economies (AEs) will have two dimensions — changes in short-term policy rates and balance sheet adjustments. This will affect emerging market economies (EMs),...

This paper provides an empirical benchmarking of growth, productivity and export patterns for developing NREs against other low and middle income developing countries, to inform policy discussions and future analytical work. There is stark heterogeneity in the association of resource sector and...

This paper analyzes drivers of rising per-pupil public education spending, including Baumol’s “cost disease” effect. Higher wages paid to teachers contributed significantly to the increase in per-pupil spending over the past decades. Empirical analyses using a large dataset of advanced and...

This paper documents the structural transformation in employment that has taken place in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the past 15 years. In contrast to Asian economies, where at least half of the labor flows out of agriculture have gone into industry, in SSA, most of the workers have ended up...

Although there are several measures of fiscal transparency, none provides satisfactory information on certain issues of macroeconomic relevance, including whether fiscal data are available for all of general government, whether the government reports a balance sheet, and whether spending and...

We propose a toolkit for the assessment of systemic risk buildup in low income countries. We show that, due to non-linearity in the relationship between credit and financial stability, the assessment should be conducted with different tools at different stages of financial development. In...

This paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of life expectancy assumptions on the liabilities of private U.S. defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using detailed actuarial and financial information provided by the U.S. Department of Labor, we construct a longevity variable...

Statistical offices have often recourse to benchmarking methods for compiling quarterly national accounts (QNA). Benchmarking methods employ quarterly indicator series (i) to distribute annual, more reliable series of national accounts and (ii) to extrapolate the most recent quarters not yet...

The Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) for low-income countries (LICs) is a standardized analytical tool to monitor debt sustainability. This paper uses DSAs from three periods around the time of the global economic crisis to analyze the projected trajectories of debt ratios for a sample of...

This paper studies the linkage between structural coherence and economic growth. Structural coherence is defined as the degree that a country's industrial structure optimally reflects its factor endowment fundamentals. The paper found that at least for the overall capital, the shares of capital...