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

Mr. Enrico Berkes

Ms. Catherine A. Pattillo

Mr. Andrew Berg

Mr. Yorbol Yakhshilikov

The World Bank and the IMF have adopted a debt sustainability framework (DSF) to evaluate the risk of debt distress in Low Income Countries (LICs). At the core of the DSF are empirically-based thresholds for each of five different measures of the debt burden (the “debt threshold approach” DTA). The DSF contains a rule for aggregating the information contained in these five different variables which we label the “worst-case aggregator” (WCA) in view of the fact that the DSF considers a breach of any one of the thresholds sufficient to indicate a high risk of debt distress. However, neither the DTA nor the WCA has heretofore been subject to empirical testing. We find that: (1) the DTA loses information relative to a simple proposed alternative; (2) the WCA is too conservative (predicting crises too often) in terms of the loss function used in the DSF; and (3) the WCA is less accurate than some simple proposed alternative aggregators as a predictor of debt distress.

Assessing Bias and Accuracy in the World Bank-IMF's Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries

Andrea Presbitero

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