This Selected Issues paper on Burundi highlights that after the Arusha Peace Agreement in 2000 Burundi has faced a wide range of challenges to generate sustained and equitable economic growth and improve social conditions. Burundi has begun to stabilize the economy, liberalized the trade and...

Burundi is in great need of investment in infrastructure, but fiscal constraints leave little room for additional public spending. Despite this initial recovery, Burundi has yet to rebuild its pre-civil war level of public capital stock. Improving the business climate is one of the keys to...

The strategy underlying the Arusha agreement envisaged a three-year transition period, involving further national reconciliation steps, implementation of lasting power-sharing arrangements, and initiation of national reconstruction. To overcome poverty, Burundi should diversify its economy and...

This paper examines the empirical evidence on the contribution that government and, in particular, capital expenditure make to the growth performance of a sample of developing countries. Using the Denison growth accounting approach, this study finds that social expenditures may have a...

This paper evaluates the performance of two alternative policy rules, a forward-looking rule and a spontaneous adjustment rule, under alternative inflation targets, in terms of output losses in a macroeconomic model, using European Union data. The simulations suggest that forward-looking rules...

This paper reviews the recent growth experience of the Greek and Portuguese economies and their determinants, comparing it with the rest of the euro area as well as a large set of other economies. Estimates from fixed effects panel and cross-section regressions are used to estimate how changes...