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This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of structural change patterns in the world economy. It uses a new dataset on sectoral employment produced by the International Labour Organization, which is complemented by national accounts and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The sample includes 169 countries, representing about 99 percent of the world's output and population in 2013. One of the main contributions of this paper is its focus on the sub-regional level, which has been hitherto absent from the literature. We provide an assessment of 13 sub-regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America in order to offer deeper and richer insights into the recent dynamics of structural change. Overall, our results suggest that within-sector productivity improvements were the key driver of output per capita growth in most sub-regions. Nonetheless, structural change has also played a critical role in enhancing economic performance since 2002 - mainly through services. Changes in the demographic structure and employment rates have also contributed to the recent performance, albeit to a much lesser extent. Accelerating the pace of structural change - by exploiting existing productivity gaps - will be crucial to sustain current economic growth rates in developing regions.

This paper focuses on the macroeconomic management of large inflows of foreign aid. It investigates the extent to which African countries have coordinated fiscal and macroeconomic responses to aid surges. In practice, we construct a panel dataset to investigate the level of aid 'absorption' and 'spending'. This paper departs from the recent empirical literature by utilising better measures for aid inflows and by employing cointegration analysis. The empirical short-run results suggest that, on average, Africa's low-income countries have absorbed two-thirds of (grant) aid receipts. This suggests that most of the foreign exchange provided by the aid inflows has been used to finance imports. The other third has been used to build up international reserves, perhaps to protect economies from future external shocks. In the long-run, absorption increases but remains below its maximum ('full absorption'). Moreover, we also show that aid resources have been fully spent, especially in support of public investment. There is only weak evidence that a share of aid flows have been 'saved', i.e. substituted domestic borrowing. Overall, these findings suggest that the macroeconomic management of aid inflows in Africa has been significantly better than often portrayed in comparable exercises. The implication is that African countries will be able to efficiently manage a gradual scaling up in aid resources.

This paper uses the cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model to assess the dynamic relationship between foreign aid inflows, public expenditure, revenue and domestic borrowing in Ethiopia. It departs from the existing literature by using a unique quarterly fiscal dataset (1993-2008) and providing new insights into the formulation of testable fiscal hypotheses. The paper also derives and interprets structural shocks and places a strong focus on model specification. The results suggest the presence of three long-run relationships: the government budget constraint, a donor disbursement rule, and a financing trade-off. Foreign aid grants adjust to the level of development spending, which can be seen as an indication of (procyclical) aid conditionality. Moreover, domestic borrowing often compensates for lower levels of revenue and grants, highlighting the cost of aid unpredictability and revenue volatility. The policy implication is that if foreign aid flows are to be made more effective, they should be provided in a predictable and countercyclical fashion in order to smooth exogenous shocks.

This paper investigates the determinants of the real exchange rate (RER) in Ethiopia. In particular, it assesses whether large capital inflows (e.g. foreign aid and remittances) have an impact on the RER. This empirical exercise tries to improve the current literature in a number of ways: (i) the use of quarterly data provides a larger sample size and enables the modelling of important intra-year dynamics, which should lead to better model specifications; (ii) the use of several cointegration approaches allows interesting methodological comparisons; and (iii) the use of a time series model (Unobserved Components) provides a new empirical approach and a robustness check on the econometric models. The results suggest two main (long-run) determinants of the RER in Ethiopia: trade openness is found to be correlated with RER depreciations, while a positive shock to the terms of trade tends to appreciate the RER. Foreign aid is not found to have a statistically significant impact, while there is only weak evidence that workers' remittances could be associated with RER appreciations. The lack of empirical support for the Dutch disease hypothesis suggests that Ethiopia has been able to effectively manage large capital inflows, thus avoiding major episodes of macroeconomic instability.