This paper describes a financial system that should be adopted for the 21st century. The paper highlights that the financial crisis of 2008 has raised fundamental questions about how the financial industry is structured, managed, and regulated. The paper discusses that a well-functioning...

We document external investment positions among European Union countries at the start of the financial crisis through the creation of a new database comprising bilateral external financial asset and liabilities, excluding reserve assets and derivatives. While there are some gaps in the data, the...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

After narrowing modestly in 2013, the global scale of current account imbalances, and of excess imbalances, held steady in 2014. Over the last several years, while the country composition of imbalances has rotated somewhat, overall there has been little progress on reducing excess imbalances....

The IMF's Second Pilot External Sector Report presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2012-2013 H1. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide a coherent...

The IMF's third Pilot External Sector Report (ESR) presents a multilaterally consistent assessment of the largest economies' external sector positions and policies for 2013 and early 2014. The report integrates the analysis from the Fund's bilateral and multilateral surveillance to provide a...