Among 51 countries studied, there are large regional differences in the proportion of private wealth held abroad, ranging from 3 percent in South Asia to 39 percent in Africa. Three variables explain capital flight in Africa: exchange rate overvaluation, adverse investor risk ratings, and high...

The paper evaluates big push borrowing-and-investment programs in a new model-based framework of debt sustainability that is explicitly designed for policy analysis. The new framework is grounded in a fully-articulated, dynamic macroeconomic model. It allows for financing schemes that mix...

Panel data on Ghanaian manufacturing firms are used to test predictions from models of irreversible investment under uncertainty. Information on the entrepreneur`s subjective probability distribution over future demand for the firm`s products is used to construct the expected variance of demand,...

We develop a multicountry model in which governments aim at excessive spending in order to serve the narrow interests of the group in power. This puts pressure on the monetary authorities to extract seigniorage, and thus affects the incentives countries would have to participate in a monetary...

This paper sets flight capital in the context of portfolio choice, focusing upon the proportion of private wealth that is held abroad. There are large regional differences in this proportion, ranging from 5 percent in South Asia to 40 percent in Africa. We explain cross-country differences in...

This paper examines the persistence of shocks to the terms of trade, using annual data on 42 Sub-Saharan African countries between 1960-96. We find that the persistence of terms of trade shocks varies widely for about half the countries such shocks are short-lived, while for one-third of the...

This paper assesses the non linear impact of external debt on growth using a large panel data set of 93 developing countries over 1969-98. Results are generally robust across different econometric methodologies, regression specifications, and different debt indicators. For a country with average...

We focus on the management of highly persistent shocks to aid flows, including PRSP-related increases in net inflows, in three quot;post-stabilization.quot; African economies with de jure flexible exchange rates. Such shocks have beneficent long-run effects, but when currency substitution is...

Since 1999, the IMF's staff has been tracking several early-warning-system (EWS) models of currency crisis. The results have been mixed. One of the long-horizon models has performed well relative to pure guesswork and to available non-model-based forecasts, such as agency ratings and private...

This study reviews Albania's historical and political background, as well as economic developments in 1991. It describes the centrally planned economic system up to the onset of reform and analyzes economic performance in the 1980s.