This study compares the sources of growth in East Asia with the rest of the world, using a methodology that allows one to decompose total factor productivity (TFP) growth into technical efficiency changes (catching up) and technological progress. It applies a varying coefficients frontier...

Despite its robust economic fundamentals relative to other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Singapore did not escape from the Asian Crisis that spread through Asia-Pacific and engulfed the global economy. First, this study uses two approaches to calculate real...

This article examines the post-crisis exchange rate management in the selected East Asian countries, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. The main findings are as follows: First, the trends of the coefficient of variation in the monthly nominal exchange rates and foreign exchange...

Prevailing views suggest that short-term, unhedged foreign borrowing and crony capitalism, in combination with a weak financial system and lack of transparency may lie at the heart of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Although the crisis first began in Thailand, it quickly spread to the rest...

Based on annual data spanning the period 1968 to 2000, this paper empirically tests the proposition that growth in Guyana's foreign debt burden contributed to increases in pressure in the country's foreign exchange market. After controlling for other factors that influence changes in foreign...

The growth of the financial sector of an economy such as, the stock market is usually found to be highly correlated with the growth of the real sector of an economy. In this study, we make an attempt to investigate whether there is any significant relationship between the stock prices,...

Microfinance promises to trim down poverty. To achieve this noble objective microfinance institutions (MFIs) have to become steady profitable because donor constancy is not a given. Thus important question is: what factors drive the financial sustainability of MFIs? Using data on 217 MFIs in 101...

Illiquidity is at the core of the various currency and banking/financial crises of the 1990s. In the wake of the Asian crisis of 1997/98 the term ìsystemic liquidityî has been coined to refer to adequate arrangements and practices which permit efficient liquidity management and which provide a...

Falling government and donor funding, which has traditionally supported microfinance, is followed by an expansion of financially self-sustainable Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). This development has raised the concern as to whether the social goals of traditional microfinance would be equally...

The cross-country empirical literature on the finance-growth relationship has debated three propositions. These are (i) Financial deepening has a strong impact on the growth process (ii) Measures of financial “activity” rather than the “size” of the sector plays a more significant role...