Seychelles's strong stabilization efforts has helped the economy to overcome debt crisis and global recession under the Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). But the authorities need to address monetary policy trade-offs, and financial sector challenges exist. Executive Directors welcomed Seychelles's...

Periods of banking distress are often followed by sizable and long-lasting contractions in bank credit. They may be explained by a declined demand by financially impaired borrowers (the conventional financial accelerator) or by lower supply by capital-constrained banks, a "credit crunch". This...

Policy-makers have attributed the scale of the credit crisis and its profound impact on money markets (as well as financial sector stability) to the fast rise of securitization and the way it has arguably complicated both the conduct of monetary policy and the effect of interest rate...

This paper reviews the experience with capital controls in industrial and developing countries, considers the policy issues raised when the effectiveness of capital controls diminishes, examines the medium-term benefits and costs of an open capital account, and analyzes the policy measures that...

What determines the ability of governments from developing countries to access international credit markets? We examine this question using detailed data on sovereign bond issuances and public syndicated bank loans since 1982. We find that traditional measures of a country’s links with the...

Using the longest dataset publicly available (The Economist's index of industrial commodity prices), we analyze the behavior of real commodity prices over the period 1862-99, and have two main findings. First, while there has been a downward trend in real commodity prices of 1.3 percent per year...

Investment-to-GDP ratios across the Caribbean tend to be relatively high. In many countries, these ratios have been trending higher since the mid-1990s, largely reflecting public investment and foreign direct investment. Private domestic investors have been less prominent. This may be one reason...

We examine the determinants of capital flows to four developing countries during the 1990s using an explicitly disequilibrium econometric framework in which the supply and demand for capital are not necessarily equal and the actual amount of the flow is determined by the ‘short side’ of the...

We examine the short- and long-run effects of financial liberalization on capital markets. To do so, we construct a new comprehensive chronology of financial liberalization in 28 mature and emerging market economies since 1973. We also construct an algorithm to identify booms and busts in stock...

This paper studies the implications of foreign currency deposits (FCDs) for international liquidity shortages in Pakistan. The analysis focuses on how the large volume of FCDs and the specific institutional characteristics of those deposits have made the Pakistan economy highly vulnerable to...