In October 2024, an assessment was undertaken of the data quality of the public sector debt statistics (PSDS) of the Republic of Zambia against the IMF's Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) for PSDS. The assessment was undertaken as part of a project to strengthen the quality of public...

An IMF team found that Panama has a cash-based system of budgeting and accounting that generates good information on many aspects of public finances. There are, however, many weaknesses in the system which diverge from the sound practices included in the Fund's Fiscal Transparency Code. Panama's...

Most firms and portfolio managers rely on backtests (or historical simulations of performance) to select investment strategies and allocate them capital. Standard statistical techniques designed to prevent regression over-fitting, such as hold-out, tend to be unreliable and inaccurate in the...

With the advent in recent years of large financial data sets, machine learning and high-performance computing, analysts can backtest millions (if not billions) of alternative investment strategies. Backtest optimizers search for combinations of parameters that maximize the simulated historical...

We develop a novel ranking methodology to rank the market forecaster. In particular, we distinguish forecasts by their specificity, rather than considering all predictions and forecasts equally important, and we also analyze the impact of the number of forecasts made by a particular forecaster....

With transnationals now of immense significance to many economies and thus seeming to have immense leverage over host governments, this book looks at what can be done to influence the behaviour of these corporations. With a case study of Glaxo