The economic and financial crisis is affecting the fiscal accounts of virtually every country. Public sector support for the financial system, fiscal stimulus and the automatic stabilizers, as well as the revenue decline from the downturn in commodity and asset prices, are leading to sharp...

Although still beset with many problems, the world economy took a decided turn for the better in 1983.

Regional trade arrangements have recently attracted growing interest, as existing schemes are either being extended or revived and new groupings are being formed. This study reviews recent initiatives and the experience with regional integration in industrial and developing countries and...

Staff work for this report has entailed mainly a forecasting exercise covering 1983 in depth and 1984 on a preliminary basis. The 1984 projections are not presented in tabular form but are incorporated at various point in the text to amplify the analysis.

The role of exchange rate policy in economic adjustment has been widely studied and is the subject of numerous theoretical and empirical papers produced in the Fund and elsewhere.

This paper was originally prepared for a seminar of the Executive Board of the Fund. In the seminar, Executive Directors expressed a broad range of views with regard to both the adequacy of the Fund's approach to financial programming and the validity of the analysis presented in this paper.

The financial turmoil of the late 1990s prompted a broad search for tools and techniques for detecting and preventing financial crises, and more recent episodes of instability have high lighted the importance of continuous monitoring of financial systems as a tool for preventing crises. This...

Over the past two decades, Nigeria has not reaped fully the benefits of its national wealth despite its efforts at structural adjustment. This paper concludes that the facts do not justify the negative image that structural adjustment has had in Nigeria. Vigorous market reforms and tight...

The striking turnaround in the Netherlands economic performance over the past decade and a half has attracted widespread attention. Emerging from deep recession and high unemployment in the early 1980s, the economy shifted to a pace of growth more rapid than that in neighboring economies, and...

This paper presents an overview of the economy of Hungary. The paper highlights that during the Fifth Five-Year Plan (1976–80), actual growth rates for almost all major plan aggregates remained below the targets. The lower targets set for the increase in both consumption and investment in...