Post-conflict countries receive substantial aid flows after the start of peace. While post-conflict countries' capacity to absorb aid (that is, the quality of their policies and institutions) is built up only gradually after the onset of peace, the evidence suggests that aid tends to peak...

This paper studies the cyclical aspects of fiscal policy in Sub-Saharan Africa countries during 1970?2014. It compares the cyclical properties of real government consumption in the region with those in other developing regions and high-income countries, and examines whether there has been a...

Deepening real and financial integration of developing countries into the world economy has prompted renewed interest in the contribution of external shocks to their macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper revisits the issue using four decades of annual data for a large sample of developing...

This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output...

Academics and policy makers have long considered an adequate supply of infrastructure services to be essential for economic development. This paper reviews recent theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of infrastructure development on growth and income distribution. The theoretical...

Over the past 15 years, gross inflows to industrial and developing countries have enjoyed a wild ride. After reaching record highs in the run-up to the global financial crisis, they collapsed dramatically in 2008-09. As signs of global recovery reappeared, capital inflows resumed although at...

This paper discusses recent trends and investigates the drivers of capital flows across regions in the world, with emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa. The post-global financial crisis behavior of capital flows into Sub-Saharan Africa is unique and differs from that of global capital flows. The...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on how fiscal space in Sub-Saharan Africa has evolved over the past 15 years. Fiscal space is a multi-dimensional concept that is proxied by indicators capturing aspects of fiscal sustainability, balance sheet vulnerabilities, external debt positions,...

In the post-global financial crisis period, the financing of countercyclical policies led not only to a reduction in the fiscal surpluses across Sub-Saharan African countries, but also an increase in their levels of indebtedness. Although public debt for the region in 2018 was still below that...

This paper examines systematically the growth effects of trade integration in Sub-Saharan Africa. It complements and improves upon the empirical literature in two aspects: first, it jointly estimates the impact of different dimensions of trade integration, namely, trade volumes, export/trade...