There is an increasing need for a system of international lending of last resort (ILLR) to provide a safety net in the event of financial crises in vulnerable countries as financial globalization deepens and spreads. Multilateral progress to address liquidity and solvency crises has been patchy...

The debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid has intensified in recent years as aid has come under increasing budgetary pressures in donor countries. Whatever the merits of the opposing arguments, the fundamental issue arises of whether conventionally-used measures of aid such as ODA, which...

This paper generates a typology of balance-of-payments crises under rational expectations, namely liquidity and solvency crises. The ex-post application of official financial rescue packages of sufficient size is a perfect cure for liquidity crises, but amounts to an ineffective and costly...

The paper addresses the adequacy of post-reform growth in Latin America in the 1990s on the basis of international comparison and other relevant standards, analytically exploring and empirically testing a number of hypotheses to explain the perceived dissatisfaction with growth performance. It...

Financial liberalization and integration have generated disappointing results. They were supposed to set up a win-win situation: capital would flow from capital-abundant, low-return, aging industrial countries to capital-scarce, high-return, young emerging countries. Growth in receiving...

We examine the implications of a North-South trade accord where investments in the Southern partner nation exhibit country risk. Our analysis demonstrates that North-South trade accords can serve as credibility-enhancing mechanisms that induce additional foreign capital inflows into Southern...

This paper combines development accounting exercises with economic theory to assess the importance of total factor productivity and the accumulation of factors of production as engines of growth in Latin America. Using the new, drastically revised Penn World Table (PWT) and Barro-Lee datasets,...

The conventional paradigm about development banks is that these institutions exist to target well-identified market failures. However, market failures are not directly observable and can only be ascertained with a suitable learning process. Hence, the question is how do the policymakers know...