As use of macroprudential policy tools is growing, the IMF has initiated an annual survey on macroprudential policy with its membership. The resulting new database provides information on policy measures taken by IMF member countries as well as on the institutional arrangements in place to...

Capital flows can deliver substantial benefits for countries, but also have the potential to contribute to a buildup of systemic financial risk. Benefits, such as enhanced investment and consumption smoothing, tend to be greater for countries whose financial and institutional development enables...

As countries design and implement macroprudential policies, they face the challenge of determining what-if any-changes need to be made to their legal and institutional framework to ensure that these policies are effective. Based on a review of experience, it is clear that there are a variety of...

Small developing states are disproportionately vulnerable to natural disasters. On average, the annual cost of disasters for small states is nearly 2 percent of GDP-more than four times that for larger countries. This reflects a higher frequency of disasters, adjusted for land area, as well as...

The 2008 crisis underscored the interconnectedness of the international business cycle, with U.S. shocks leading to the largest global slowdown since the 1930s. We estimate spillover effects across major advanced country regions in a structural VAR (SVAR) using pre-crisis data. Our new method...

This paper focuses on the private nonfinancial sectors of the affected economies, financial liberalization provided households and businesses with greater access to credit markets. This contributed to the long period of expansion during the 1980s. Partly as a result of major changes to the...