This paper discusses Romania’s Request for a Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). Since the 2008 global financial crisis, Romania has made significant progress in reducing macroeconomic imbalances and rebuilding fiscal and financial buffers. However, Romania remains vulnerable to external shocks,...

The depth of the crisis and the weakness of the ensuing recovery led to new ways to implement monetary policy. At the onset of the crisis, central banks in several advanced economies quickly moved policy rates to zero and initiated large-scale asset purchases. In more recent years, with...

This paper reviews the interest rate structure that would apply to the PRGT in 2017-18. Based on the interest rate setting mechanism agreed in 2009, the interest rate for the Extended Credit Facility (ECF) would be zero and the rate for the Standby Credit Facility (SCF) would be 0.25 percent....

In recent months, a number of Directors have expressed support in the Executive Board for a further extension of the temporary exceptional interest waiver on concessional lending. An extension would send a signal of the Fund's continued support for Low-Income Countries at a time when the global...

This is the first review of the interest rate mechanism approved under the 2009 reforms of the Fund's concessional lending facilities. The mechanism links the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) interest rate structure to world interest rates and provides a setting to differentiate...

This paper provides the basis for the second review of the interest rate structure approved under the 2009 reforms of the Fund's concessional lending facilities. Based on the application of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) interest rate mechanism, PRGT interest rates for 2015-16...

The three-month Eurepo interest rate, the euro component of the SDR interest rate basket, will be discontinued as of the end of 2014. The three-month Eurepo rate, administered by the European Money Market Institute (EMMI), has been the representative interest rate instrument of the euro area in...

This paper develops a technique to value guarantees on interest payments on developing-country debt, and provides some preliminary estimates of the cost of such guarantees. The cost of interest payment guarantees is not directly observable because a guarantee is a contingent obligation that...

This paper identifies macroeconomic stability, effective bank supervision, and an appropriate sequencing of stabilization, banking regulations, and interest rate policies as common characteristics of the relatively successful experiments in financial sector liberalization. Recent theoretical...

Nominal interest rate pegging leads to instability in an IS-LM model with a vertical long-run Phillips curve and backward-looking inflation expectations. However, it does not lead to instability in several large multicountry econometric models, apparently primarily because these models have...