When discussing debt reduction strategies, little attention has been given to the role of governments’ nonfinancial assets. This is in part because data are scarce. Drawing on various data sources, this paper looks at the size, composition, and management of state-owned nonfinancial assets...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries real GDP per capita to examine this...

This paper assesses the vulnerability of emerging markets and their banks to aggregate shocks. We find significant links between banks' asset quality, credit and macroeconomic aggregates. Lower economic growth, an exchange rate depreciation, weaker terms of trade and a fall in debt-creating...

We develop a tractable small open-economy model to study the first-round effects of international food price shocks in developing countries. We define first-round effects as changes in headline inflation that, holding core inflation constant, help implement relative price adjustments. The model...

The paper first describes how the Czech National Bank (CNB) moved gradually from a fixed exchange rate regime to the frontiers of Inflation-Forecast Targeting. It then focuses on the CNB’s recent experience in adding the exchange rate as a complementary monetary policy tool to stimulate...

The Flexible System of Global Models (FSGM) is a group of models developed by the Economic Modeling Division of the IMF for policy analysis. A typical module of FSGM is a multi-region, forward-looking semi-structural global model consisting of 24 regions. Using the three core modules focused on...

This paper tests the theoretical framework developed by North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) on the transition from closed to open access societies. They posit that societies need to go through three doorsteps: (i) the establishment of rule of law among elites; (ii) the adoption of perpetually...

Investment across the euro area remains below its pre-crisis level. Its performance has been weaker than in most previous recessions and financial crises. This paper shows that a part of this weakness can be explained by output dynamics, particularly before the European sovereign debt crisis....

We investigate the relation between changes in tax composition and long-run economic growth using a new dataset covering a broad cross-section of countries with different income levels. We specifically consider 69 countries with at least 20 years of observations on total tax revenue during the...

The paper contributes to the discussions on fiscal governance in Europe. It takes stock of recent reforms, identifies areas for further progress, and discusses a menu of policy options for the medium-term. The issues covered include: (i) the growing complexity of the European framework and ways...