This is the 2004 (Volume 51) Special Issue of IMF Staff Papers, which includes 6 selected papers (from more than 20) that were presented at the IMF's Fourth Annual Research Conference, November 6-7, 2003.

This paper presents a broad overview of postwar analytical thinking on international macroeconomics, culminating in a more detailed discussion of recent progress. The paper reviews important empirical evidence that has inspired alternative modeling approaches, as well as theoretical and policy considerations behind developments in the field. The paper presents an empirical study of fiscal policy in countries with extreme monetary regimes. It also examines members of multilateral currency unions, dollarized countries that officially use the money of another country, and countries using currency boards.

The paper discusses a model in which growth is a negative function of fiscal burden. Moreover, growth discontinuously switches from high to low as the fiscal burden reaches a critical level. The paper provides an overview of key elements of corporate bankruptcy codes and practice around the world that are relevant to the debate on sovereign debt restructuring. It also describes the broad trends in international financial integration for a sample of industrial countries and explains the cross-country and time-series variation in the size of international balance sheets.

This paper focuses on expectations for the American economy focused on the likelihood of secular stagnation, which continued to be debated throughout the post-war period. Concerns rose during the late 1960s and early 1970s about rapid population growth smothering the potential for economic growth in developing countries were contradicted when, during the mid- and late-1970s, fertility rates began to decline rapidly. In policy-oriented institutions (and in most businesses and individual decision making), policymaking decisions are often guided by projections and forward-looking indicators. The case of Michael Mussa has been one of great anticipation, and of great accomplishment, and all the early optimistic forecasts about him have turned out to be correct. Within the sphere of economics, undoubtedly the most famous and widely used forecast—one, incidentally, that thus far has often been incorrect—is that based on the Malthusian doctrine of the relationship between resources and population.

This paper reports for uncovered interest parity (UIP) using daily data for 23 developing and developed countries during the crisis-strewn 1990s. UIP is a classic topic of international finance, a critical building block of most theoretical models, and a dismal empirical failure. UIP states that the interest differential is, on average, equal to the ex post exchange rate change. UIP may work differently for countries in crisis, whose exchange and interest rates both display considerably more volatility. This volatility raises the stakes for financial markets and central banks; it also may provide a more statistically powerful test for the UIP hypothesis. Policy-exploitable deviations from UIP are, therefore, a necessary condition for an interest rate defense. There is a considerable amount of heterogeneity in the results, which differ wildly by country.

This is the 2004 (Volume 51) Special Issue of IMF Staff Papers, which includes 6 selected papers (from more than 20) that were presented at the IMF's Fourth Annual Research Conference, November 6-7, 2003.

Studies of the impact of trade openness on growth are based either on crosscountry analysis—which lacks transparency—or case studies—which lack statistical rigor. This paper applies a transparent econometric method drawn from the treatment evaluation literature (matching estimators) to make the comparison between treated (that is, open) and control (that is, closed) countries explicit while remaining within a statistical framework. Matching estimators highlight that common cross-country evidence is based on rather far-fetched country comparisons, which stem from the lack of common support of treated and control countries in the covariate space. The paper therefore advocates paying more attention to appropriate sample restriction in crosscountry macro research.

This first issue of Volume 51 for 2004 includes a new paper by Peter B. Clark and Jacques J. Polak, along with a tribute from the Editor to Mr. Polak in honor of his 90th birthday. This issue also launches a new featured section, "Data Issues," which will be devoted in future issues to on-going discussions of the latest in econometric and statistical tools for economists, data puzzles, and other related topics of interest to researchers.

This paper empirically investigates the monetary impact of banking crises in Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, and Uruguay during 1975–98. Cointegration analysis and error correction modeling are used to research two issues: (i) whether money demand stability is threatened by banking crises; and (ii) whether crises lead to structural breaks in the relation between monetary indicators and prices. Overall, no systematic evidence that banking crises cause money demand instability is found. The paper also analyzes inflation targeting in the context of the IMF-supported adjustment programs.