The 2012 Article IV Consultation and Fourth Review under the three-year Extended Credit Facility (ECF) Arrangement discusses the macroeconomic conditions of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Mauritania’s economy has performed well in 2011, despite significant challenges. Economic...

This paper proposes a methodology for analyzing dynamic misalignment in managed exchange rate systems that combines the estimation approach to modeling the real exchange rate with the calibration approach to generating the equilibrium real exchange rate. The methodology is applied to the Thai...

This paper addresses the issue of threshold effects between public debt and economic growth in the Caribbean. The main finding is that there exists a threshold debt to gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 55–56 percent. Moreover, the debt dynamics begin changing well before this...

This paper explores the relationship between external debt and poverty. A number of observers have argued that high external indebtedness is a major cause of poverty. Using the first-differenced general method of moments (GMM) estimator, the paper models the impact of external debt on poverty,...

The staff report for the 2006 Article IV Consultation on Antigua and Barbuda highlights the economic backdrop and outlook for restoring sound public finances. The government of Antigua and Barbuda has adopted an ambitious reform program in its endeavor to pull the economy from decades of fiscal...

This paper analyzes the duration of house price upturns and downturns in the last 40 years for 19 OECD countries. I provide two sets of results, one pertaining to the average length and the other to the length distribution. On average, upturns are longer than downturns, but the difference...

This Selected Issues Paper on Iran reviews that monetary factors are the main determinants of inflation in the country. Government spending out of oil revenues leads to large liquidity injections that the central bank accommodates owing to its efforts to prevent a significant nominal...

This paper analyzes the effects of IMF member countries participation in the IMF’s Data Standards Initiatives (DSI) on the statistical quality of WEO forecasts. Results show that WEO forecasts for SDDS subscribers are in general better than for GDDS participants and those member countries...

In the IMF staff’s view, Honduras’s debt is subject to a moderate risk of distress. The framework follows a methodology for assessing the risk of debt distress in low-income countries (LICs), guided by indicative, country-specific external debt burden thresholds derived from the...