This Financial System Stability Assessment on France discusses the French financial system and the restructuring of French banks to different business models. The French banking system weathered the 2007–09 global financial crisis well. The large French banks have announced plans to meet...

It is widely perceived that competition in the Indian banking sector has increased since the inception of the financial sector reforms in 1992. Using annual data on scheduled commercial banks for the period 1996-2004, the paper evaluates the validity of this claim in the Indian context. The...

With much healthcare publicly funded, Hong Kong's rapidly aging population will significant raise fiscal pressure over coming decades. We ask what the implications are of meeting these costs by public funding, or private funding voluntarily or through mandates. Our simulations suggest that...

The paper assesses the degree of banking competition and efficiency in Italy?over time as well as compared to that in other countries, such as France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The paper finds competition in the Italian banking sector has intensified in loan and...

This Selected Issues paper on Denmark underlies estimates of inefficiencies in the goods and labor markets. The IMF’s new macroeconomic model, the global economic model (GEM), has been used to provide estimates of the impact of successfully implementing the European Council’s...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix for Netherlands Antilles examines the economic growth in Small Island Economies. The paper finds that the Small Island Economies as a group grew faster than the rest of the world during 1960–85. The paper analyzes whether Small Island...

One of the most significant recent developments in world trade has been the entry of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO). This paper examines the implications of China's WTO accession for India's trade, using both econometrics and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. The paper...

Of the new members entering the European Union (EU) in May 2004, several had achieved a decade of impressive export growth, expanding significantly their shares of world markets. The empirical analysis shows that over the period 1994–2004, quality and technology upgrading associated with...