As the world economy slowly recovers from the very deep and widespread recession of recent years, many countries confront very serious fiscal imbalances. How much time they have to deal with these imbalances is a central question, the salience of which can only have been increased by the ongoing...

This paper analyses the determinants of international bank lending to the largest countries in Asia and Latin America through a framework based on push/pull factors. Our results show that both types of factors determine international bank lending. However, they differ from those of the early...