Working Papers
January 1, 0001
$name
January 1, 0001
$name
January 1, 0001
$name
January 1, 0001
$name
January 1, 0001
$name
2002
July 1, 2002
Collateral in Loan Classification and Provisioning
Description: Adequate loan classification practices are an essential part of a sound and effective credit risk-management process in a bank. Failure to identify deterioration in credit quality in a timely manner can aggravate and prolong the problem. Two key issues arise with regard to the use of collateral in the context of loan classification and provisioning. In particular, the questions arise whether collateral should be taken into account in classifying a collateralized loan, and whether it should be considered in calculating provisions. This paper surveys country practices in the role of collateral in loan classification and provisioning, and suggests good practices on these issues.
July 1, 2002
Capital Account Liberalization and Economic Performance: Survey and Synthesis
Description: This paper reviews and discusses issues involved in assessing the relationship between capital account liberalization and economic performance. First, it discusses the different measures of restrictions used in the literature. Second, it reviews the literature on the relationship between growth and capital account liberalization. Finally, it identifies and explains some of the differences in the results of the various studies and provides some support for a positive effect of capital account liberalization on growth, especially for developing countries.
July 1, 2002
Is Growth Enough? Macroeconomic Policy and Poverty Reduction
Description: The paper investigates the existence of "super pro-poor" policies-that is, policies that directly influence the income of the poor after accounting for the effect of growth. It uses a dynamic panel estimator to capture both across- and within-country effects, and a Bayesian-type robustness check to account for model uncertainty. The findings confirm that growth raises the income of the poor, although this relationship is less than one-to-one. The analysis also identifies four super pro-poor conditions that are influenced by policy: inflation, government size, educational achievement, and financial development.
July 1, 2002
It’s Not What You Make, It’s How You Use IT: Measuring the Welfare Benefits of the IT Revolution Across Countries
Description: This paper analyzes the welfare benefits from falling relative prices of IT (information technology) goods across a wide range of countries. We find, using two separate methodologies and datasets, that welfare benefits mainly accrue to users of IT, not their producers, because of falling relative prices. This is important, as IT production and use are highly differentiated across countries, and implies that earlier work on how IT production affects real GDP, while useful in calibrating the overall benefits of the IT revolution, are a less valuable way of assessing the distribution of benefits.
July 1, 2002
Poverty in a Wealthy Economy: The Case of Nigeria
Description: This paper describes the nature and evolution of poverty in Nigeria between 1985 and 1992. It highlights the potential wealth of the Nigerian economy and examines how the economic policies pursued in the 1980s and 1990s impacted economic growth and welfare. The headcount measure of poverty in Nigeria declined from 43 percent to 34 percent between 1985 and 1992. Decomposing the factors causing the reduction in poverty shows that the overall decline of 9 percentage point was the net result of a 14 percentage point decline owing to the growth factor and a 5 percentage point increase owing to the income distribution factor. The paper proposes that promoting broad-based growth and targeted interventions in health, education, and infrastructure need to be central strategies in the fight against poverty in Nigeria.