To better respond to the unprecedented demand from the membership for financing and crisis support in response to the covid-19 pandemic, there is a temporary postponement of staff's work on Article IV consultations and mandatory Financial Stability Assessments. To ensure the postponement has no...

At an informal Board meeting in January, there was broad support for removing the current blanket prohibition on the provision of non-audit-related consulting services by the Fund's external audit firm and replacing it with a blacklist approach, subject to robust safeguards to ensure the...

This technical note explores the reasons for a comparatively high interest rate spread in Kazakhstan in the context of competition in the banking sector. In spite of significant gains in efficiency made in recent years, operational costs and provisioning for loan losses remain high compared with...

Analyses of debt relief that focus on the behavior of debtors and existing creditors understate the incentives for collective action by creditors. It is well known that debt relief could benefit existing creditors by providing incentives for domestic investment by residents of debtor countries....

Observers have often characterized asset markets as being subject to periods of tranquility and periods of turbulence. Until recently, however, researchers were unable to produce closed-form asset pricing formulas in a model environment of time-varying risk. Some work by Abel provided us with...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of the real exchange rate and the price of equity for a small open economy using an optimizing model in which the process of capital accumulation entails adjustment costs. The analysis demonstrates that along an adjustment path toward long-run equilibrium,...

We examine a large panel of more than 100 banks from Argentina to study the effects of bank consolidation on performance between December 1995 and December 2000, a period of heavy bank consolidation and relative calm. Overall, we find a positive and significant effect of bank consolidation on...

This technical note on strategic issues in Development Bank (DB) reform for Mexico examines advances in the area of DB and funds in 2000–05. There have been significant but uneven changes in the institutional setting, instruments, transparency of subsidies, and performance behavior of DBs...

This Work Program (WP) translates the strategic directions and policy priorities laid out in the Fall 2019 Global Policy Agenda (GPA) Update and the International Monetary and Financial Committee Communique into an Executive Board agenda from November 2019 to October 2020, focusing on the next...

This Work Program (WP) translates the strategic directions and policy priorities laid out in the Spring 2018 Global Policy Agenda (GPA) Update and the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) Communique into an Executive Board agenda for the next twelve months