This paper looks empirically at some economic effects of volatile exchange rates and financial conditions and examines policy responses for managing such volatility. It also sheds light on some economic costs that stem from volatile capital flows and exchange rates and analyzes how countries deploy their policy toolkits in response. The data-driven analysis should contribute to ongoing reflections about how to manage volatile capital flows and exchange rates both in Asian EMEs and more bro...

The changing political landscape in the Arab world has created opportunities for economic transformation by tackling long-standing economic issues. Nevertheless, three years after the onset of political transition, implementing necessary economic policies has proven to be challenging. This paper lays out key elements of economic policy reform for Arab countries in transition.

This publication brings together a set of IMF papers that prepared as backgrounds for the various sessions of the conference and will help put into broader dissemination channels the results of this important conference. An official IMF publication is well disseminated into academic and institutional libraries and book channels. The IMF metadata will also make the conference papers more discoverable online.

The changing political landscape in the Arab world has created opportunities for economic transformation by tackling long-standing economic issues. Nevertheless, three years after the onset of political transition, implementing necessary economic policies has proven to be challenging. This paper lays out key elements of economic policy reform for Arab countries in transition.

This paper examines water challenges, a growing global concern with adverse economic and social consequences, and discusses economic policy instruments. Water subsidies provided through public utilities are estimated at about $456 billion or 0.6 percent of global GDP in 2012. The paper suggests that getting economic incentives right, notably by reforming water pricing, can go a long way towards encouraging more efficient water use and supporting needed investment, while enabling policies t...

Restoring a country's debt to a sustainable path after a sovereign debt restructuring is key to ensuring a credible and durable exit from the crisis. In recent years, a number of countries have restructured their sovereign liabilities, either following a default, or preemptively, to avoid a default. This Occasional Paper takes stock of the experiences of some of these countries--Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Moldova, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uruguay--with debt-restructu...