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The financial sector in Bangladesh remains at an early stage of development. It needs to be strengthened and invigorated so it can fulfill its dual role of reducing poverty and promoting economic growth. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the financial sector in Bangladesh and pinpoints areas of weakness in its subsectors. Broad reforms to the sector and complementary parallel reforms are set out.

The financial sector in Bangladesh remains at an early stage of development. It needs to be strengthened and invigorated so it can fulfill its dual role of reducing poverty and promoting economic growth. This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the financial sector in Bangladesh and pinpoints areas of weakness in its subsectors. Broad reforms to the sector and complementary parallel reforms are set out.

Previous research on the prediction of fiscal aggregates has shown evidence that simple autoregressive models often provide better forecasts of fiscal variables than multivariate specifications. We argue that the multivariate models considered by previous studies are small-scale, probably burdened by overparameterization, and not robust to structural changes. Bayesian Vector Autoregressions (BVARs), on the other hand, allow the information contained in a large data set to be summarized efficiently, and can also allow for time variation in both the coefficients and the volatilities. In this paper we explore the performance of BVARs with constant and drifting coefficients for forecasting key fiscal variables such as government revenues, expenditures, and interest payments on the outstanding debt. We focus on both point and density forecasting, as assessments of a country's fiscal stability and overall credit risk should typically be based on the specification of a whole probability distribution for the future state of the economy. Using data from the US and the largest European countries, we show that both the adoption of a large system and the introduction of time variation help in forecasting, with the former playing a relatively more important role in point forecasting, and the latter being more important for density forecasting.

A two-country business cycle model featuring nominal rigidities, countercyclical mark-ups, rule of thumb consumers and government spending reversals is used to identify inequality predictions that are robust across a range of empirically plausible parameterizations. These robust inequality restrictions are imposed onto a regime-change factor model for the United States and its main trade partners to estimate the international fiscal spillovers. The effects of U.S. government spending on foreign real activity are found to be sizable and significant, operating mainly by lowering real interest rates rather than boosting trade balances. In contrast, there seems to be only limited evidence of state dependence in the international transmission of fiscal policy.