Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.
This volume examines the impact on economic performance of structural policies-policies that increase the role of market forces and competition in the economy, while maintaining appropriate regulatory frameworks. The results reflect a new dataset covering reforms of domestic product markets, international trade, the domestic financial sector, and the external capital account, in 91 developed and developing countries. Among the key results of this study, the authors find that real and financial reforms (and, in particular, domestic financial liberalization, trade liberalization, and agricultural liberalization) boost income growth. However, growth effects differ significantly across alternative reform sequencing strategies: a trade-before-capital-account strategy achieves better outcomes than the reverse, or even than a "big bang"; also, liberalizing the domestic financial sector together with the external capital account is growth-enhancing, provided the economy is relatively open to international trade. Finally, relatively liberalized domestic financial sectors enhance the economy's resilience, reducing output costs from adverse terms-of-trade and interest-rate shocks; increased credit availability is one of the key mechanisms.
The management of financial crises in emerging markets is a vital and high-stakes challenge in an increasingly global economy. For this reason, it's also a highly contentious issue in today's public policy circles. In this book, leading economists-many of whom have also participated in policy debates on these issues-consider how best to reduce the frequency and cost of such crises. The contributions here explore the management process from the beginning of a crisis to the long-term effects of the techniques used to minimize it. The first three chapters focus on the earliest responses and the immediate defense of a currency under attack, exploring whether unnecessary damage to economies can be avoided by adopting the right response within the first few days of a financial crisis. Next, contributors examine the adjustment programs that follow, considering how to design these programs so that they shorten the recovery phase, encourage economic growth, and minimize the probability of future difficulties. Finally, the last four papers analyze the actual effects of adjustment programs, asking whether they accomplish what they are designed to do-and whether, as many critics assert, they impose disproportionate costs on the poorest members of society. Recent high-profile currency crises have proven not only how harmful they can be to neighboring economies and trading partners, but also how important policy responses can be in determining their duration and severity. Economists and policymakers will welcome the insightful evaluations in this important volume, and those of its companion, Sebastian Edwards and Jeffrey A. Frankel's Preventing Currency Crises in Emerging Markets.
In the last ten to fifteen years, profound structural reforms have moved Latin America and the Caribbean from closed, state-dominated economies to ones that are more market-oriented and open. Policymakers expected that these changes would speed up growth. This book is part of a multi-year project to determine whether these expectation have been fulfilled. Focusing on technological change, the impact of the reforms on the process of innovation is examined. It notes that the development process is proving to be highly heterogenous across industries, regions and firms and can be described as strongly inequitable. This differentiation that has emerged has implications for job creation, trade balance, and the role of small and medium sized firms. This ultimately suggests, amongst other things, the need for policies to better spread the use of new technologies.
Assessing Aid determines that the effectiveness of aid is not decided by the amount received but rather the institutional and policy environment into which it is accepted. It examines how development assistance can be more effective at reducing global poverty and gives five mainrecommendations for making aid more effective: targeting financial aid to poor countries with good policies and strong economic management; providing policy-based aid to demonstrated reformers; using simpler instruments to transfer resources to countries with sound management; focusing projects oncreating and transmitting knowledge and capacity; and rethinking the internal incentives of aid agencies.
The twenty-one contributions in this book assess the controversy surrounding the Fund and provide judgments about the criteria for Fund lending which should help readers understand and analyze both its ongoing role in smoothing adjustment to international payments imbalances and its currently critical position in responding to the debt crisis.
Over the past year, developing countries have started to recover from the 1997-99 global financial crisis. The elements underlying the recovery: strong industrial country growth, robust global trade, and firming commodity prices, should permit more 'self-financing' and more sustainable growth in developing countries than has been the case following previous crises. International capital market flows, however, remain selective and volatile. This publication provides a comprehensive look at external debt and financial flows to developing countries. Volume one examines these developments in detail and charts the prospects for private and public global development finance. It explores the special risks and benefits of short-term capital flows, reviews policy options for countries to safeguard against the volatility of private capital flows, and draws lessons from the past century's booms and busts in private flows to emerging markets. It also reviews debt-structuring agreements and privatisation transactions and contains summary data for country groups. Volume two provides statistical data for 137 countries reporting debt under the World Bank Debtor Reporting System. The country tables present a wealth of information about each country's external debt and cover major economic aggregates and key debt ratios. Data is also provided on debt service paid, average terms of new commitments, currency composition of long-term debt, debt restructuring, and scheduled debt service projections. To facilitate cross-country comparisons of key statistics, summary statistical tables are provided for regional and income groups. This publication is available on a Windows-based CD-ROM that contains all the time-series data from the World Bank Debtor Reporting System, allowing users to graph, map, and extract the data in many formats; as well as the contents of both volumes in searchable page format.
Since 1983 Ghana has become a test case of the efficacy of the World Bank and the IMF's stabilization and adjustment-based lending policies. The government has "bitten the IMF bullet" with a vengeance, with deregulated currency, liberalized trade, slimmed down state-owned enterprises and strengthened bureaucracies as prescribed by the lending institutions. In terms of compliance, Ghana has been a model patient. The outcomes of the policies are, however, only beginning to be documented. This study looks at the lives of Ghanaian men and women after almost ten years of adjustment and reveals adjustment and its concomitant effects as part of a continuous and ongoing process within the contemporary history and development of Ghana. District, regional and national perspectives are also woven into the picture, giving both wider macro- and more qualitative emphases.
This study provides a systematic approach to the key dimensions of analysis in support of policy-based operations. Concepts presented include understanding the macroeconomic context of sector policy reforms using a macro-meso-micro perspective, using dimensions of sector diagnosis to identify sequential binding constraints to development in a prevailing policy and institutional environment, and assessing the effects of policy change. Also included are examples of measuring the costs of policy change and lessons from incorporating policy change assessments into policy operation design.
