In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

GDP growth is likely to remain strong, although narrowly driven by a mining investment boom, increasing the economy’s vulnerability to terms of trade shocks. Outside the mining sector, growth is expected to be slow with still weak consumer confidence and a strong exchange rate weighing on...

This Selected Issues paper summarizes estimates of the gap between current housing prices and their equilibrium levels in the United States. It examines short-term dynamics of price adjustment. Reflecting uncertainties about how to analyze underlying housing price trends, two approaches are used...

This 2009 Article IV Consultation focuses on euro area policies. The euro area remains in recession, with signs of improvement yet to evolve into a recovery. The large drop in financial wealth, an associated increase in private savings, tight financing conditions, and the adjustment of global...

Effective arrangements for micro and macroprudential policies to further overall financial stability are strongly desirable for all countries, emerging or advanced. Both policies complement each other, but there can also be potential areas of overlap and conflict, which can complicate this...

This paper analyzes empirically the recent Asian financial crisis using high frequency data of exchange rates and stock indices of the Philippines and Thailand. Utilizing standard time-series techniques, this study confirms that there is evidence that developments in some sectoral...

We test for the existence of a moral hazard effect attributable to official crisis lending by analyzing the evolution of sovereign bond spreads in emerging markets before and after the Russian crisis. The nonbailout of Russia in August 1998 is interpreted as an event that decreased the perceived...

This paper discusses the role of asset management companies (AMCs) in facilitating bank restructuring and specifies some policy lessons learned from international experience. The paper concludes that there is no single optimal solution but a combination of strategies that will vary from bank to...

This paper introduces a comprehensive database on bank ownership for 137 countries over 1995-2009, and reviews foreign bank behavior and impact. It documents substantial increases in foreign bank presence, with many more home and host countries. Current market shares of foreign banks average 20...

In this paper we identify some of the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of international large-scale complex banks using the novel CoVaR approach. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find no evidence that a...