North-South free trade agreements (FTAs), bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments often contain a number of provisions that can increase the likelihood of a financial crisis and make it more difficult to take the necessary measures to deal with one...

This report is intended as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks the developing world debt crisis has been resolved. In fact, it assesses fears of a new debt crisis, more serious than before, spreading to nearly 40 countries. 38 of the 43 countries that the World Bank calculates are most...

In late March the release of data on sale of new homes in the US showed that it had dropped 10 per cent, the biggest drop in nine years. In the immediate aftermath of this report, the US currency gave up some ground against the Euro and other major currencies. Bond yields dropped and rate hike...

Most standard indicators suggest that India’s reserve stock is more than adequate. The rapid stockpiling of foreign exchange reserves implies that the RBI has been leaning-against-the-wind to keep down the value of the Indian Rupee. As India has become more export-oriented it has become...

The turmoil that has characterised the global financial markets since the 1990s, and particularly the crisis in East Asia, has generated a great deal of support for proposals to add some frictions to the wheels of international finance, as part of overall reforms to the global financial...

The paper examines the current problems with the IMF which include: 1) the institution is no longer fulfilling the functions it used to fulfil, nor is there a clear vision of any new functions for it; 2) due to a drastic pruning of its loan operations, it is not receiving enough revenue to cover...

This paper outlines a proposal for a controlled approach to capital account liberalization for economies experiencing large capital inflows. The proposal essentially involves securitizing a portion of capital inflows through closed-end mutual funds that issue shares in domestic currency, use the...

The international trade in Afghan drugs is one of the most significant transnational threats emanating from Central Asia. Exacerbated by weak border management, corruption, and lack of income-generating alternatives, the “Northern Route†is a scourge not only for the Central Asian...

When analyzing the appropriate response for monetary policy during a currency crisis it is important to keep in mind two distinct channels: (a) the impact of raising interest rates on exchange rates; and (b) the direct impact of exchange rate changes on output. The first pertains to the monetary...

For many decades, macro-policy in India was conducted in an environment with five key elements: Agricultural shocks rather than a conventional business cycle; A closed economy; deeply distortionary tax policy coupled with a fiscal crisis; financial markets that lacked speculative price discovery,...