This paper identifies tax factors in 21 developing countries that have an impact on foreign direct investment flows. It categorizes those factors into issues associated with tax coordination; tax rates and rate structures; and composition of the tax base. Recent actions by countries reveal no...

This paper reviews the experiences of a few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that have succeeded in attracting fairly large amounts of foreign investment. The review indicates that sustained efforts to promote political and macroeconomic stability and implement essential structural reforms have...

Country practices towards managing financial risks on a sovereign balance sheet continue to evolve. Each crisis period, and its legacy on sovereign balance sheets, reaffirms the need for strengthening financial risk management. This paper discusses some salient features embedded in in the...

This paper investigates the effect of fiscal transparency on market assessments of sovereign risk, as measured by credit ratings. It measures this effect through a direct channel (uncertainty reduction) and an indirect channel (better fiscal policies and outcomes), and it differentiates between...

References to policy credibility, particularly with regard to fiscal policy, are ubiquitous in both economic literature and financial markets, even though it is not directly observable. The case of the EU new member states (NMS)-emerging markets joining a supranational entity that is generally...

This paper studies the effect of individual uncertainty on collective decision-making to implement innovation. We show how individual uncertainty creates a bias for the status quo even under irreversible voting decisions, in contrast with Fernandez and Rodrik (1991). Blocking innovation is...

While the use of public resources is critical to cushion the impact of the financial crisis on the euro-area economy, it is key that the entailed fiscal costs not be seen by markets as undermining fiscal sustainability. From this perspective, to what extent do movements in euro area sovereign...

This study finds that equity returns in the banking sector in the wake of the Great Recession and the European sovereign debt crisis have been driven mainly by weak growth prospects and heightened sovereign risk and to a lesser extent, by deteriorating funding conditions and investor sentiment....

This paper explores how privatizing a pension system can affect sovereign credit risk. For this purpose, it analyzes the importance that rating agencies give to implicit pension debt (IPD) in their assessments of sovereign creditworthiness. We find that rating agencies generally do not seem to...

This paper evaluates empirically four types of cost that may result from an international sovereign default: reputational costs, international trade exclusion costs, costs to the domestic economy through the financial system, and political costs to the authorities. It finds that the economic...