This paper estimates agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) in 162 countries between 1991 and 2015 and aims to understand sources of cross-country variations in agricultural TFP levels and its growth rates. Two factors affecting agricultural TFP are analyzed in detail - imported...

In recent years, Fund staff has prepared cross-country analyses of macroeconomic vulnerabilities in low-income countries, focusing on the risk of sharp declines in economic growth and of debt distress. We discuss routes to broadening this focus by adding several macroeconomic and macrofinancial...

In recent years, Brazil has achieved substantial progress in capital market development by building a diversified investor base and expanding the menu of available financial instruments. In this context, we evaluated the invested Brazilian market portfolio for a period spanning 2005-15. This is...

The paper examines the transmission of business cycle fluctuations and credit conditions from advanced and emerging market economies to Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs), using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and related countryspecific error correction models. We compile a...

We compared the predictive performance of a series of machine learning and traditional methods for monthly CDS spreads, using firms' accounting-based, market-based and macroeconomics variables for a time period of 2006 to 2016. We find that ensemble machine learning methods (Bagging, Gradient...

Public and private sector balance sheets are an important component to any analysis of debt sustainability. A vulnerable and indebted private sector can become a sudden liability for the government; alternatively, resilient household and bank balance sheets may reveal potential sources of...

This paper documents stylized facts on the process of structural transformation around the world and empirically analyzes its determinants using data on real value added by sector of economic activity (agriculture, manufacturing and services) for a panel of 168 countries over the period...

This paper provides an overview of trade reform in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) since 1996 and a quantitative assessment of potential effects on trade patterns and tariff revenue of the current reform agenda. Despite evidence of significant trade complementarities within...