The Czech Republic’s strong fundamentals helped to sustain economic growth with low unemployment and underpin strides toward convergence with EU-15. Executive Directors welcomed the euro accession strategy and the sustained implementation of the Maastricht criteria, which would provide a...

This paper reports on Bangladesh’s Financial System Stability Assessment. Considerable progress has been made in strengthening the resilience of the country's financial sector. Total assets of the banking sector have increased twofold since 2003, and credit to the private sector has risen...

This paper-consisting of a regional study and seven country studies-reviews the state of domestic public debt markets in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama as at end-2005. Although they account for the lion's share of capital markets, regional...

This paper describes the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) and systemic CCA to the top four commercial banks in Sweden. The balance sheet stress tests for four major banks were complemented with tests based on the CCA framework, a risk-adjusted balance sheet relating bank asset...

This paper investigates convergence and dynamic effects of human and physical capital on growth, in WAEMU countries. Using recently developed models for panel data and a growth accounting model, the study finds that growth is largely explained by changes in literacy rates and factor...

A simple criterion based on the properties of the forecast error is presented to evaluate the accuracy of forecasts. The efficiency conditions of an optimization problem are used to show that under rational expectations the standard statistical conditions are necessary, but not sufficient to...

This paper develops the theoretical background for the Limited Information Bayesian Model Averaging (LIBMA). The proposed approach accounts for model uncertainty by averaging over all possible combinations of predictors when making inferences about the variables of interest, and it...

This paper describes a corporate sector vulnerability indicator, the expected number of defaults (END), based on the joint occurrence of defaults among a number of firms and/or institutions. The END indicator is general enough to assess systemic risk in the corporate and financial sectors, as...