This paper focuses on Second Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The economic sectors have undergone significant restructuring. This restructuring has been concentrated on production capacities, quality and efficiency, thus contributing to economic...

The IMF's surveillance over its member's economic policies is one of the institution's central activities. In keeping with the increasing transparency of the IMF; the Executive Board askes a group of independent external experts to evaluate IMF surveillance, to assess the effectiveness of such...

This report, commissioned by the Executive Board, was prepared by a committee of academic economists. The report assesses the appropriateness of current research activities, the quality and added value of the IMF's economic research and its utility in the IMF among its member countries and...

International standards for measuring foreign direct investment (FDI) have become important in today’s global economy, where multinational enterprises exercise economic clout and FDI statistics can reflect investor sentiment about the climate of investment in a country. This joint IMF/OECD...

This paper presents the views of Lawrence H. Summers on the U.S. current account deficit and the global economy. Summers highlights that the U.S. current account deficit is currently running well in excess of US$600 billion at an annual rate, in the range of 5.5 percent of GDP. It represents...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

Capital flows can deliver substantial benefits for countries, but also have the potential to contribute to a buildup of systemic financial risk. Benefits, such as enhanced investment and consumption smoothing, tend to be greater for countries whose financial and institutional development enables...