The large international bailouts of the 1990s have been criticized for differentreasons, in particular for generating moral hazard at the expense of theglobal taxpayer. We argue in this paper that some of these concerns areexaggerated or misleading because international bailouts have no or...

We study the empirical determinants of China's capital flight. In addition to the covered interest differential, our empirical exercise includes a rather exhaustive list of macroeconomic variables and a few institutional factors. Overall, our regression exercise shows that China's capital flight...

For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country...

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...

This paper takes stock of the economic performance of resource rich countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) over the past forty years. While those countries have maintained high levels of income per capita, they have performed poorly when going beyond the assessment based on...

This paper examines the effects that windfalls from international commodity price booms have on net foreign assets in a panel of 145 countries during the period 1970-2007. The main finding is that windfalls from international commodity price booms lead to a significant increase in net foreign...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the impact of commodity price volatility on economic growth in a panel of up to 158 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that commodity price volatility leads to a significant increase in non-resource GDP growth in...

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the...

This paper examines the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on different components of portfolio flows, namely equity and bond flows, as well as the dynamic linkages between exchange rate volatility and the variability of these two types of flows. Specifically, a bivariate GARCH-BEKK-in-mean...

We study the renminbi (RMB) covered interest differential - an indicator of the effectiveness of capital controls. It is found that the differential is not shrinking over time and, in fact, appears larger after the global financial crisis than before. That is, capital controls in China are still...