This paper uses a growth diagnostics approach à la Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) to identify the most'binding'constraints to private sector growth in Mongolia - a small, low-income, mineral-rich, transition economy. The approach of applying the HRV methodology is useful in those cases...

Increasing portfolio investment flows to emerging markets in the past few years have led to fears of a sudden reversal of these flows and possible portfolio switching (from one emerging market to another) among foreign investors. To assess the sustainability of such portfolio flows, the author...

The 1990s brought developing countries the heaviest private capital flows since the early 1980s, says the author - mainly bond and equity financing, rather than medium- and long-term lending by commercial banks. Flows were mainly to Asia in the first half and Latin America in the second half....

Developing countries rely on short-term trade credits for imports of several essential consumer goods, including medicines and basic food supplies. The credits also facilitate export-related transactions. The mechanisms commercial banks use to provide trade credits to developing countries are...

This paper introduces an"index of macroeconomic space"-- demonstrating the ability of acountry to run a countercyclical fiscal policy or a fiscal stimulus at any point in time -- to show how a sample of 20 mostly middle-income countries had entered the 2008 global financial crisis with different...

This paper investigates the factors associated with foreign direct investment"surges"and"stops,"defined as sharp increases and decreases, respectively, of gross foreign direct investment inflows to the developing world and differentiated based on whether these events are led by waves in...

This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries -- the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey -- to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the...

In the next 10 years or so, the infrastructure sector has the potential to generate significant employment. This paper estimates annual job creation of about 2.0 million in direct jobs and 2.5 million in direct, indirect and induced infrastructure-related jobs just by meeting the infrastructure...

Which foreign direct investments are most affected by political instability? Analysis of quarterly greenfield investment flows into countries in the Middle East and North Africa from 2003 to 2012 shows that adverse political shocks are associated with significantly reduced investment inflows in...

Duty drawback schemes, which typically involve a combination of duty rebates and exemptions, are a feature of many countries'trade regimes. They are used in highly protected developing economies as a means of providing exporters with imported inputs at world prices, thus increasing their...