The US current account deficit has been persistently large and has brought the country's ratio of foreign debt to GDP to 20%, a figure that is high by historical standards. This paper argues that while US solvency is not a near-term constraint on ongoing deficits, the sheer size of the US...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

The Washington Consensus suffers from fundamental inadequacies, and that a more comprehensive framework of the economic process is needed to guide the formulation of country-specific development strategies. The following five propositions summarise the set of interrelated arguments made in this...

Inward FDI in developing Mediterranean countries is supposedly expected to soar as a result of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EURO-MED) between the European Union and twelve Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries that emerged from the 1995 Barcelona Conference. This is especially true...

The central claim in this paper is that by explicitly introducing costs of international trade (narrowly, transport costs but more broadly, tariffs, nontariff barriers and other trade costs), one can go far toward explaining a great number of the main empirical puzzles that international...

The primary purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between bank capital and credit risk taking in emerging market economies. We also investigate the influence of several regulatory, institutional and legal features on the relationship between risk and capital. We apply a...

In this paper we investigate the coherence between bank ratings and default probability in emerging market economies using scoring and mapping techniques. In order to achieve its disciplining role, the rating should be coherent with the default risk it summarizes and disseminate. This issue is...

In an earlier paper (Los, 1998a), the exact and complete return attribution framework of Singer and Karnosky (1995) was extended to include market risk measurements for n countries. Exploiting a selection matrix based on the cash accounting identities, the resulting degenerate portfolio choice...

Financial instruments such as documentary credit, structured finance and derivatives have proved their value in commodity trade. However, the sophistication of these instruments can also make them a tool for financial fraud. This report discusses how, using commodity market instruments such as...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the validity of some behavioral conjectures as alternative explanations of bank risk-taking behavior. We especially focus on the different valuation of gains and losses relative to a reference point, and the changing attitude toward risk conditional on...