EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Context: The authorities are pursuing a wide-ranging economic reform program against a background of political liberalization. Challenges are formidable, however, as the authorities’ capacity to design and implement far-reaching reforms and absorb international assistance is...

This Selected Issues paper for the Russian Federation discusses existing empirical efforts to measure the determinants of cross-country financial integration. Empirical studies that have adopted the gravity-model framework have found that it is generally successful in explaining bilateral...

Macroeconomic developments have been very favorable since early 1999, strengthening in important areas lately. Real GDP has more than recovered from the recession that followed the 1998 crisis and the recovery is gaining momentum, with recent data suggesting that real GDP is growing at an annual...

The Russian economy has improved after the recession, but recovery is fragile. Executive Directors appreciated the pre-crisis policy of taxing and saving oil revenues in a stabilization fund, which had created significant space for fiscal expansion, monetary easing, and extraordinary liquidity...