A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...

This note addresses various types of incentives that must be established before a market economy can function effectively. It also argues that the enormous challenge of restructuring large industrial enterprises or reabsorbing their workers, while appropriately based on market signals, cannot be...

This paper provides indirect tests of the hypothesis that exchange rate movements may be largely coterminus with changes in preferences for holding claims on different countries. It is argued that changes in country preferences will be reflected systematically in the price of gold and, hence,...

This paper presents a framework for evaluating the relative contributions of different creditors in cases where only partial payments can be made by the debtor country. A methodology is developed to calculate partial payments—or alternatively put—determine residual financing. By focusing on...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

Official controls on interest rates and capital flows rule out the use of traditional interest rate parity conditions to measure changes in the degree of capital mobility confronting developing countries. This paper develops an alternative technique for measuring the cost of undertaking...