This paper provides an assessment of India’s inflation-targeting regime. It shows that the Reserve Bank of India is best characterized as a flexible inflation targeter: contrary to criticism, it does not...
According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle. Focusing on emerging markets, this paper asks whether this conventional wisdom still holds in the contemporary world. The results show that...
The recent reversal of capital flows to emerging markets has pointed up the continuing relevance of the sudden stop problem. This paper analyzes the sudden stops in capital flows to emerging markets since...
The "tapering talk" starting on May 22, 2013, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke first spoke of the possibility of the U.S. central bank reducing its security purchases, had a sharp negative impact...
In May 2013, Federal Reserve officials first began to talk of the possibility of tapering their security purchases. This tapering talk had a sharp negative impact on emerging markets. Different countries...
This paper considers the determinants of exports of modern services and traditional services. It considers the growth of export volumes as well as export surges, that is, the periods of rapid sustained...
This issue includes the following: mashup indices of development; impact analysis of rural electrification projects in Sub-Saharan Africa; what can we learn about the 'resource curse' from foreign aid?...
This issue includes the following: the new structural economics comments on the new structural economics; gender and firm creation; enterprise performance; and business environments and development.
This is a background case note for the 2011 World Development Report. The Marshall Plan is invoked whenever policy makers contemplate large-scale foreign aid. The foreign aid program officially known as...
Symposium on foreign direct investment (FDI); collecting the pieces of the FDI knowledge spillovers puzzle; by Roger Smeets; can survey evidence shed light on spillovers from FDI? By Beata S. Javorcik;...
The real exchange rate was not at the center of the first generation of neoclassical growth models, nor was it prominent among the policy prescriptions that flowed from those models. Recent analyses, in...
Capital account liberalization, it is fair to say, remains one of the most controversial and least understood policies of our day. One reason is that different theoretical perspectives have very different...
Capital account liberalization: what do cross-country studies tell us? by Barry Eichengreen. Where has all the education gone? by Lant Pritchett. Measuring the dynamic gains from trade; by Romain Wacziarg...
It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not resort to financial rescue for countries in crisis; this is hard to do when there is no alternative. That is where collective action clauses...
This paper analyzes data on nearly one thousand developing country bonds issued during 1991-96, a period that spans the recent episode of heavy reliance on bonded debt. Both the issue decisions of debtors...
The essays in this book grew out of background papers for World Development Report 1994, which focused on infrastructure and development. The first half of the book reviews the interplay of private initiative...
Unitary versus collective models of the household: is it time to shift the burden of proof? Parallel exchange rates in developing countries. Incentives and the resolution of bank distress. Financing infrastructure...
In recent years suggestions for reforming the provision and financing of infrastructure services in developing countries have focused on private participation. This alternative to public financing is seen...
Arguments for financing infrastructure development through government subsidies and foreign borrowing meet with increasing skepticism. Numerous "white elephants" subsidized by governments have strengthened...
This article analyzes the sovereign defaults of the 1930s and reports nine major findings : 1) there is little evidence that financial markets of the 1930s were unsophisticated; 2) debt default in the...