Archived Series > IMF Special Issues
Abstract
What is the impact on trade in sub-Saharan Africa of the recent rapid growth in China and other Asian countries, and the associated commodity price boom? This paper looks at how trading patterns (both destinations and composition) are changing in sub-Saharan Africa. Has the region managed to diversify the products it sells from commodities to manufactured goods? Has it expanded the range of countries to which it exports? And what about the import side? The time is ripe for sub-Saharan African countries to climb up the value chain of their commodity-based exports and/or achieve an export surge based on labor-intensive manufacturing.
Abstract
This primer explains why macroeconomists need to be concerned with issues of health policy and elaborates the essential information that a macroeconomist should know in providing inputs to discussions on health sector policy. The primer illustrates how these issues and the range of appropriate policy options may differ depending on the state of development of an economy and the particular approach taken by a country in structuring its health system. The primer also highlights the appropriate roles for the state and market in health care financing and provision, taking account of the various sources of market failure in the health sector.
Abstract
Cambodia's reconstruction and reform efforts have spanned almost 25 years following the Khmer Rouge period, which ended in 1979. Economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, but reform efforts were beset by ongoing internal tensions and civil unrest. Although external factors, including sizable aid inflows and a trade agreement with the United States, helped boost growth in the past decade, the country remains one of the poorest in the region. The current coalition government has announced a strategy aimed at revitalizing economic reforms, and in 2004 Cambodia formally joined the World Trade Organization. But elimination of the garment quota system under the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing is exposing an underlying deterioration in competitiveness, which, coupled with slow growth in the agriculture sector and other structural obstacles to private sector growth, has resulted in a medium-term outlook that remains uncertain.