Applying a consumption-smoothing model to five ASEAN countries reveals that excessive private consumption has not tended to characterize their widening external imbalances in recent years, except to a small degree in Indonesia and Malaysia. Beyond consumption smoothing, however, a number of...

This paper addresses two questions relating to the output decline in Poland since the initiation of market-oriented reforms at the beginning of 1990. First, to what extent is the decline in output a generalized phenomenon, rather than reflecting the short-term effects of resource reallocation in...

This paper shows that the response of inflation to external shocks is very different when the authorities target the real exchange rate than when they follow a fixed exchange rate or a preannounced crawling peg. Specifically, shocks that would have no effect on the steady-state inflation rate...

The household saving ratio in France has undergone very sharp changes over the past two decades, falling dramatically in the first part of the 1980s before rising in more recent years. This paper emphasizes two factors in the evolution of private saving in France. The first relates to...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing whether capital flows to developing countries are determined by economic fundamentals or by purely speculative forces. We use the intertemporal optimizing approach to current account determination as our benchmark for judging the behavior of capital...

This paper looks at fiscal solvency and public debt sustainability in both emerging market and advanced countries. Evidence of fiscal solvency, in the form of a robust positive conditional relationship between public debt and the primary fiscal balance, is established in both groups of...

Why have emerging market economies (EMEs) been stockpiling international reserves? We find that motives have varied over time?vulnerability to current account shocks was relatively important in the 1980s but, as EMEs have become more financially integrated, factors related to the magnitude of...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. DEBT SUSTAINABILITY ANALYSIS AND RISK -- III. DEBT DYNAMICS AND THE CONDUCT OF FISCAL POLICY -- IV. RISKS TO DEBT SUSTAINABILITY IN FIVE EMERGING MARKET ECONOMIES -- V. CONCLUSION -- Appendix -- REFERENCES.

It is often argued that the parallel market premium is a useful indicator of real exchange rate misalignment in developing countries. The empirical evidence does not, however, suggest the existence of a robust correlation between these two endogenous variables that is independent of the nature...

Uncertainty about the export earnings accruing to a country (sometimes referred to as export instability) is an important source of macroeconomic uncertainty in many developing countries. Theory predicts that countries should react to increases in this form of uncertainty by increasing their...