Can an accrual budgeting system-a system in which budgetary spending authorizations to line ministries are formulated in accrual terms-serve the needs of good fiscal policy? If so, how must such a system be designed? What are the practical challenges which may arise in implementing sound fiscal...

This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle; over the last decade, the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together....

In several Caribbean states, unregulated investment schemes grew quickly in recent years by claiming unusually high monthly returns and through a system of referrals by existing members. These are features shared with traditional Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes. This paper describes the growth...

This paper analyzes the scope for systematic rules-based fiscal activism in open economies. Relative to a balanced budget rule, automatic stabilizers significantly improve welfare. But they minimize fiscal instrument volatility rather than business cycle volatility. A more aggressively...

This paper presents a model for Inflation Targeting under imperfect policy credibility. It modifies the conventional model in three ways: an endogenous policy credibility process, by which monetary policy can gain or lose credibility over time; non-linearities in the inflation equation and in the...

The paper analyzes Chile's structural balance fiscal rule in the face of copper price shocks originating in foreign copper demand. It uses a version of the IMF's Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal Model (GIMF) that includes a copper sector. Two results are obtained. First, Chile's current...

The purpose of this lecture is to look beyond the complex events that characterize the global financial and economic crisis, identify the basic mechanisms, and infer the policies needed to resolve the current crisis, as well as the policies needed to reduce the probability of similar events in...

This is the fourth of a series of papers that are being written as part of a larger project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit to which economists have access for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In...

An influential strand of recent research has claimed that large governments in European countries explain their weaker long-term economic performance compared to the U.S. On the other hand, despite these alleged costs, large governments have been popular with electorates. This paper seeks to...

Long-term investors face a common problem-how to maintain the purchasing power of their assets over time and achieve a level of real returns consistent with their investment objectives. While inflation-linked bonds and derivatives have been developed to hedge the effects of inflation, their...