Understanding of the domestic political environment is key to building broad country ownership and the successful implementation of reform programs supported by international financial institutions (IFIs). But recipient countries are not unitary actors: policymakers are influenced by special...

Economic adjustment and reform programs, including those supported by international financial institutions (IFIs), must cope with informational asymmetries and special interest politics. This presents a particularly serious issue when IFIs make structural economic reforms a condition for...

Improving the effectiveness of financial assistance programs is a priority of international financial institutions (IFIs). This paper examines the effectiveness of alternative assistance instruments in a dynamic political economy framework. Economic policies of the receiving country are...

We analyze how the altruism of an international financial institution (IFI) towards its lowincome member countries (LICs) alters the effectiveness of its loans. We study IFI loans to a credit-constrained LIC. The IFI's repayment policy is determined by the interplay of its concerns for the...

We examine the empirical determinants of the demand for international reserves and compare the experiences of some Asian and Latin American economies. Our empirical results indicate that different vintages of the model of international reserves give different inferences about the appropriate...

The study assesses the level of integration among the three Greater China economies (namely China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) and examines the suitability of a Greater China currency union. Currently, the three economies have extensive trade and investment linkages. Our analyses show that these...

The prospect of creating a currency union consisting of China, Japan, and Korea is evaluated using output data. After a brief discussion on the interactions between the three countries, the study investigates whether these three countries have common synchronous business cycles, which are...

One argument for floating the Chinese renminbi (RMB) is to insulate China¡¦s monetary policy from the US effect. However, we note that both theoretical considerations and empirical results do not offer a definite answer on the link between exchange rate arrangement and policy dependence. We...