This study examines the relative importance of political and economic variables in the determination of a country’s standing in credit ratings provided by commercial rating agencies. It finds that creditworthiness appears to be determined primarily by economic variables. While including...

This paper analyzes the economic determinants of developing country creditworthiness indicators for over 60 developing countries for the period from 1980 to 1993. Our results indicate that economic fundamentals--the ratio of non-gold foreign exchange reserves to imports, the ratio of the current...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper considers the problem of allocation of investment for a debtor country that faces a ceiling on the amount of foreign debt it can accumulate. It shows that it is optimal for the debtor country to create a more open economy by favoring investment in the export sector over investment in...

In discussing the June 2014 paper, Executive Directors broadly supported staff's proposal to introduce more flexibility into the Fund's exceptional access framework to reduce unnecessary costs for the member, its creditors, and the overall system. Directors' views varied on staff's proposal to...

This paper explores how banking sector developments and characteristics influence the propagation of risks from the banking sector to sovereign debt, including how they affect the extent of fiscal costs of banking crises when those occur. It then proposes practices and policies for the fiscal...

This paper constructs and analyzes an optimizing model of a highly-indebted small open economy. An important innovation in the model is the incorporation of sovereign risk through the specification of an upward-sloping foreign debt supply function. The model is used to examine the interaction...

The focus of the paper is on five key financial stability issues in Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs), which have been selected on the basis of their degree of materiality for a reasonably broad range of EMDEs; their implications for regulatory, supervisory or other financial...

Open market operations are the major instruments of monetary control in industrial countries and are becoming important in developing countriesand countries in transition. This paper shows how open market operationsare related to other monetary instruments, discusses the role of the market and...