Ms.Monique Newiak

Ms.Stefania Fabrizio

Adrian Peralta-Alva

Luis-Felipe Zanna

Ms.Inci Otker

Ms.Genevieve Verdier

Ms.Lisa Kolovich

Mr.Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu

Ms.Catherine A. Pattillo

Baoping Shang

Andrea Presbitero

Ms.Marie-Therese Camilleri

Kazuaki Washimi

Martin Cihak

Ms.Carol L. Baker

The formal launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) sets the global development agenda through 2030, placing significant emphasis on promoting social and environmental sustainability alongside economic growth and poverty reduction. Meeting the SDGs will require actions across a wide range of areas by both national governments and the international community. This paper examines the types of policies that developing countries will need to implement to foster economic transformation, to promote economic and social inclusion, and to meet key environmental objectives. Reducing inequality, achieving gender equity, and pricing energy and water resources appropriately receive particular attention.

Policies in Support of Sustainable Development Goals

From Ambition to Execution

Panel data on Ghanaian manufacturing firms are used to test predictions from models of irreversible investment under uncertainty. Information on the entrepreneur’s subjective probability distribution over future demand for the firm’s products is used to construct the expected variance of demand, which is used as a measure of uncertainty. Empirical results support the prediction that firms wait to invest until the marginal revenue product of capital reaches a firm-specific hurdle level. Moreover, higher uncertainty raises the hurdle level that triggers investment, and uncertainty has a negative effect on investment levels that is greater for firms with more irreversible investment.

Investment, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility in Ghana

Mr.Andrew Berg

This paper evaluates three models for predicting currency crises that were proposed before 1997. The idea is to answer the question: if we had been using these models in late 1996, how well armed would we have been to predict the Asian crisis? The results are mixed but somewhat encouraging. One model, and our modifications to it, provide useful forecasts, at least compared with a naive benchmark. The head-to-head comparison also sheds light on the economics of currency crises, the nature of the Asian crisis, and issues in the empirical modeling of currency crises.

Are Currency Crises Predictable? A Test

Ms.Catherine A. Pattillo

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