Tradicionalmente Colombia se ha considerado como el país más estable de la región, nohabiendo experimentado las crisis de balanza de pagos ni corridas contra el peso, al menosen las proporciones registradas por sus vecinos. Por esta razón, es una economía que hatenido acceso permanente a...

From 2008 to 2011, Egypt was hit by significant shocks, both global and country-specific. This paper assesses the impact of the resulting macroeconomic instability on the banking sector, and examines its role as a shock absorber. The Central Bank of Egypt accommodated the shocks by supplying...

Ghana's economic growth picked up in the early 2000s and has been exceptionally strong over the past few years, with price booms of its main commodity exports, gold and cocoa, and the initiation of commercial oil production in 2011. This paper examines recent econometric evidence on Ghana's...

En este documento se examina los determinantes de la cuenta corriente en Colombia desde 1950 hasta 1996. Los resultados no permiten rechazar la hipótesis de que el mejor modelo descriptivo es el del enfoque intertemporal. En su versión más simple, éste tiene como variables explicativas las...

Despite significant progress in economic reformthroughout the 1990s, and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, the...

Given that public spending will have a positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring costs and benefits of public spending. The paper discusses one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy debates, namely,...