Economic stability, effective bank supervision, and an appropriate sequencing of stabilization, banking regulations, and interest rate policies are identified as common characteristics of the relatively successful experiments in financial sector liberalization. Recent theoretical developments...

Staff Papers has, since its inception in 1950, been an important vehicle for the dissemination of research done by staff of the IMF. The paper discusses three areas in which articles published in Staff Papers up until the 1970s made major contributions to the literature in international...

There is general puzzlement in both academic and policymaking circles about the supposed failure of the liberalization experiments that were undertaken in the mid- to late 1970s by some developing countries, particularly those located in the Southern Cone of Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and...

The behavior of private investment in developing countries has obvious implications, both for long-term development and for the design of shorter-term stabilization programs. What determines the rate of private investment and how this rate responds to changes in government policies are questions...

Given the widespread interest in the balance of payments problems of non-oil developing countries during the 1970s, the lack of systematic empirical work on the reasons for these problems is somewhat surprising. This paper pursues this issue through an examination of the quantitative...

This paper reviews Romania's experience with interenterprise arrears during 1991 with the purpose of extracting lessons that might prove useful for other economies in transition to market-based systems. The rapid growth of interenterprise arrears poses a serious policy problem in many of the...

China has been growing at a spectacular rate in recent years, enabling per capita incomes to almost quadruple in only the last decade and a half. This paper identifies the sources of economic growth in China from 1952 to 1994. While capital accumulation played an important role in China's...

As some developing countries move toward more liberalized financial systems, policymakers in these countries face the question of how interest rates respond to foreign influences and domestic policies. Most existing studies of interest rates typically treat only the extreme cases, either of a...

This paper describes the theoretical framework and presents the results of a short-term aggregate demand model constructed for the Venezuelan economy. The basic purpose was to provide a relatively simple model that could be used to forecast the level of nominal income and the balance of...