Research Brief
Debt
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debt crises have plagued low-, middle-, and high-income countries at various times. Indebted countries have generally addressed balance of payments crises either by (a) obtaining International...
Working Paper
Impacts of Africa's Growing Debt on its Growth
The main theme of this manuscript is to demonstrate that growth in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has continued to decline under the burden of the foreign debt over the last fifteen years. After a decade of painful lost growth, the continent...
Working Paper
The International Debt Problem
The aim of this paper is to raise a few open questions and to bring to light some mismatches between existing theories and the evidence. (1) It is shown that many standard international debt models unwittingly require some agents to behave...
Working Paper
The Burden of Government Debt in the Indian States
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Working Paper
Guinea-Bissau
In June 1998, Guinea-Bissau was thrown into conflict by a military revolt. This led to 11 months of fighting, extensive loss of life, and the displacement of up to a third of the country's population. This paper discusses the political economy of the...
Working Paper
Aid, Debt Relief and New Sources of Finance for Meeting the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the...
Working Paper
The Intertemporal Effects of International Transfers
The classical transfer problem is studied in an overlapping generations framework, where the transfer is from a creditor country to a debtor country. A distinction is made between tax-financed and debt-financed transfers on the one hand, and between...
Working Paper
Sustainable and Excessive Current Account Deficits
The abundance of private capital flows confronts many emerging-market authorities with a transfer problem. They must decide whether to accept or resist the net capital inflow, or how much to accept and how much to resist. This paper aims at assisting...
Working Paper
Macro-financial implications of public debt in South Africa
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector...
Working Paper
The link between public debt and public investment in Tanzania
In a bid to realize its development aspirations, Tanzania has made concerted efforts to increase public investment, particularly in the last decade. A significant proportion of these investments are financed by contracting debt, manifested by the...