This paper measures the extent to which South African economic growth is an engine of growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Results based on panel data estimation for 47 African countries over four decades suggest that South African growth has a substantial positive impact on growth in the rest of...

The paper reviews the main structural reform issues facing Arab countries in the remainder of the 1990s. While the nature, extent, and implications of the policy challenges differ among individual countries in the Arab region, several aspects are common to a large number of them. Accordingly,...

The paper presents a comparative analysis of macroeconomic dynamics of 18 Arab countries based on a panel vector autogression estimation. Comparing growth performance, fiscal and current account developments in these countries, the study concludes that (1) in the short run, external and...

Employing a dynamic panel regression, this study estimates the medium-term current account position for three subgroups of emerging market and developing countries with shared economic characteristics. The fundamental determinants of the macroeconomic balance approach to current account...

This paper presents some facts on China’s role in the world economy and measures the impact of China’s growth on growth in the rest of the world in the short and long term. Short-run estimates based on VARs and error-correction models suggest that spillover effects of...

We discuss and reconcile two diametrically opposed views concerning the future of world oil production and prices. The geological view expects that physical constraints will dominate the future evolution of oil output and prices. It is supported by the fact that world oil production has...

We examine the role of global and domestic shocks in driving macroeconomic fluctuations for Ghana. We are able to study the impact of exogenous shocks including productivity, credit supply, and commodity price shocks. We identify the shocks with a combination of sign and recursive restrictions...

We examine the impact of banks’ exposure to market liquidity shocks through wholesale funding on their supply of credit during the financial crisis in the United States. We focus on mortgage lending to minimize the impact of confounding demand factors that could potentially be large when...

This paper examines the mechanisms through which output volatility is related to trade openness using an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade. The main results are threefold. First, sectors more open to international trade are more volatile. Second, trade is...

This paper examines whether there is a threshold above which financial development no longer has a positive effect on economic growth. We use different empirical approaches to show that there can indeed be "too much" finance. In particular, our results suggest that finance starts having a...