Middle East and Central Asia > Kyrgyz Republic

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International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
This Selected Issues paper identifies constraints to economic growth in the Kyrgyz Republic, using the Hausmann-Velasco-Rodrik diagnostic approach. It finds that large infrastructure gaps, weak governance and rule of law, and high cost of finance appear to be the most binding constraints to private investment and growth. Additional critical factors are the quality of education and onerous regulations. There is room to improve both the quality and cost/efficiency of education spending. Although relatively low, labor costs have exceeded productivity growth and there is room to improve labor market efficiency. Despite important investments, the infrastructure gap remains large and the country ranks relatively low on infrastructure quality. Weak governance undermines growth through various channels: investment, human capital, and productivity. Weak institutions increase the cost of doing business and make the appropriation of investment returns less certain, overall reducing investor’s risk appetite to invest. Public debt is on the high side and the composition of spending is tilted toward current spending.
Vitor Gaspar
,
Mr. Paolo Mauro
, and
Mr. Tigran Poghosyan
How can a society’s well-being be measured to include not only average incomes but also their distribution? How can the effects of policies be assessed by considering both equity and efficiency? This primer outlines the seminal contributions of influential economists of the past, including Arthur Okun, who developed a simple method to elicit people’s preferences regarding redistribution, and Anthony Atkinson, who showed how equity and efficiency can be measured simultaneously and summarized in a single, intuitive index expressed in monetary units (such as dollars). These methods are applied to recent data to gauge how countries fare when both mean incomes and their distribution are considered together, and to a hypothetical tax-and-transfer scheme assessed through a general equilibrium model for household-level data.
Mr. Ernesto Hernández-Catá
This paper deals with liberalization and the evolution of output during the transition from plan to market. It explains why strong liberalization leads to a comparatively steep fall in output early in the transition, but a relatively strong recovery later on. Because it takes time to restructure the capital stock inherited from the old system, liberalization initially leads to transitional unemployment of capital and the contraction of the old enterprise sector. By making room quickly for the new, more efficient enterprises, however, liberalization also sets the stage for recovery and a much higher level of income in the medium term.
Mr. Vincent Koen
The vertiginous increases in the overall price level and dramatic swings in relative prices experienced by Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan since the onset of the transition rendered their traditional Paasche retail price indices obsolete and called for the introduction of Laspeyres consumer price indices. While the latter represent a major improvement, several measurement or interpretation issues remain, reflecting various potential index number biases, dispersion of prices and inflation across geographical areas and social groups, discontinuities in the inflation process, residual shortages, and seasonality.