With fiscal adjustment proceeding quickly in Bulgaria and given the weak economic growth environment, there is keen interest in making the budget composition more growth friendly. This paper quantifies the short-term impact of fiscal policy on economic activity in Bulgaria using econometric and...

The qualitative and granular nature of most structural indicators and the variety in data sources poses difficulties for consistent cross-country assessments and empirical analysis. We overcome these issues by using a machine learning approach (the partial least squares method) to combine a...

This paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between public-capital accumulation and private investment in India along the following dimensions. First, acknowledging major structural changes that the Indian economy has undergone in the past three decades, we study whether public...

This paper studies structural changes underlying China's remarkable and unprecedented growth in recent years. While patterns of structural transformation across China's provinces are broadly in line with international experience, one important difference is in labor productivity differentials...

This paper describes issues in Korea's corporate sector, the need for restructuring, and the authorities' initiatives and challenges. It then identifies lessons from other countries' experience and conducts an econometric analysis based on cross-country aggregate data,compared with previous...

China's transition to a new growth model continues and the impact has been felt across the globe. Several trends contribute to the 'maturing' of China's economy: i) structural slowing on the convergence path; ii) on-shoring deepening; and iii) demand rebalancing from investment towards...

In 1996, the IMF and the World Bank introduced the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative — a comprehensive debt relief program aimed at reducing the external debt burden of eligible countries to sustainable levels, provided they carry out strong programs of macroeconomic adjustment and...

Over the last two decades, cash holdings in nonfinancial firms around the world have increased. This phenomenon is particularly concerning in Japan, where the success of Abenomics depends on a transition from stimulus-driven to self-sustaining growth based on private consumption and investment....

Public investment is key to growth in developing oil-exporting countries and oil revenue is an important source of finance for public investment. Assessing the growth impact of public investment in Iran under various investment scaling-up (gradual, aggressive, and conservative) and oil price...

We assess econometrically the impact of asset shortages on economic growth, asset bubbles, the probability of a crisis, and the current account for a group of 41 Emerging markets for 1995-2008. The econometric estimations confirm that asset shortages pose a serious danger to EMs in terms of...