Macroeconomic Policy, Stimuli, Aid and Budgeting: What Options?

Commodity price stabilisation: macroeconomic impacts and policy options

A macroeconometric simulation study is undertaken to evaluate the impact of commodity price stabilisation (CPS) schemes for the export tree crop industry in Papua New Guinea. The findings suggest that there is a negligible level of favourable macroeconomic impacts of CPS. Contrary to the expectation, CPS adversely affects the stability of monetary and external sectors (BOP). CPS policy has fail...

Real Options – Capital Budgeting

Most investment decisions present the following three characteristics: • Irreversibility: The investment is partially or completely sunk, i.e. it cannot be recovered. • Uncertainty: The best that can be done is to assess the probabilities of the alternative outcomes that can imply larger or smaller profits. • Timing: The decision can be postponed in order to get more information (but never comp...

Robustness and Macroeconomic Policy

This paper considers the design of macroeconomic policies in the face of uncertainty. In recent years, several economists have advocated that when policymakers are uncertain about the environment they face and find it difficult to assign precise probabilities to the alternative scenarios that may characterize this environment, they should design policies to be robust in the sense that they mini...

Accrual Budgeting and Fiscal Policy

* Marc Robinson is a European-based international consultant and trainer. This article was written when he was a senior economist in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable comments of Marco Cangiano, Ian Lienert, Gösta Ljungman, David Fjord Nielsen, Eivind Tandberg and participants in a seminar in the Fiscal Affairs Depa...

Macroeconomic Policy and Performance