This paper studies the interactions between access to infrastructure, women's time allocation, and economic growth in developing countries. The first part provides a review of the evidence on the impact of poor infrastructure on women's ability to allocate their time to productive activities....

This paper provides an overview of the recent analytical and empirical literature on middle-income traps. The first part examines the descriptive and statistical evidence on these traps. The second discusses the various arguments that have been put forward to explain the existence, and...

This paper reviews arguments for and against attributing explicitly a financial stability objective to monetary policy. The discussion is conducted from the perspective of middle-income countries (MICs), where bank credit plays a critical role both on the supply and demand sides. It also...

This paper examines the behavior of the finance premium after technology and monetary shocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model where borrowers use a fraction of their production (output) as collateral. We show that this simple framework is capable of producing a...

Informal credit and foreign currency markets are a widespread phenomenon in developing countries. This paper begins by reviewing the scope and nature of these markets, and the channels through which they operate. It then examines their implications for macroeconomic management, particularly in...