The volatility in international oil prices has important implications for policies that determine national retail prices of petroleum products. This paper addresses a number of issues regarding petroleum product pricing in Western Africa emphasizing international spillovers that may limit the...

En el Paraguay el mercado de seguros está todavía insuficientemente desarrollado, pese a la proliferación de compañías en especial a partir de la década del 90, coincidiendo con la desregulación del sistema financiero. Este mercado ha estado hasta febrero de 1996 regido por una Ley de...

This paper presents an analysis of the public investment scaling-up strategy for Togo using a dynamic macroeconomic model that explicitly analyzes the links between public investment, economic growth, and debt sustainability. In the model, public capital is productive and complementary to...

The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa remains a long-term development challenge for the region. Nearly 12 million African children have been orphaned as a result of the disease, and 22.5 million people in Africa 61 percent of them women live with HIV. The hyperepidemics in Southern Africa...

The paper combines state-level fiscal data with household survey data to assess the links between sub-national fiscal policy and income inequality in Brazil over the period 1995-2011. The results indicate that a tighter fiscal stance at the sub-national level is not associated with a...

In this paper we attempt to analyse whether price-based controls on capital inflows are successful in insulating economies against external shocks. We present results from vector autoregressive (VAR) models, which indicate that Chile and Colombia, countries that adopted controls on capital...

The author evaluates the effectiveness of policy measures adopted by Chile and Colombia, aiming to mitigate the deleterious effects of pro-cyclical capital flows. In the case of Chile, according to his Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) analysis, capital controls succeeded in reducing net...

This paperattempts to quantify the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on social capital with cross-country data. It estimates reduced-form regressions of the main determinants of social capital controlling for HIV prevalence, institutional quality, social distance, and economic indicators using...

The author attempts to analyze whether price-based controls on capital inflows are successful in insulating economies against external shocks. He presents results from vector auto regressive (VAR) models that indicate that Chile and Colombia, countries that adopted controls on capital inflows,...