Corruption, particularly political or “grand” corruption, distorts the entire decision-making process connected with public investment projects. The degree of distortions is higher with weaker auditing institutions. The evidence presented shows that higher corruption is associated with (i)...

This paper constructs a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers. This measure explicitly takes into account the indirect exchange rate risk that banks undertake when they lend to borrowers that will not be able to repay in the...

This paper describes the result and the methodology of updating nominal and real effective exchange rate weights on the basis of trade data over 1999-2001. The underlying framework is an updated version of the IMF''s current effective exchange rate calculation, which uses weights largely based...

International comparison of economic aggregates, expressed in domestic currencies, requires their conversion into a common numeraire currency such as the U.S. dollar or the SDR. Since market (or official) exchange rates are subject to fluctuations which may result in comparisons that do not...