High household wealth is often cited as a key strength of the Italian economy. Both in absolute terms and relative to income, the Italian household sector is wealthier than most euro area peers. A sizable fraction of this wealth is held by the rich and upper middle classes. This paper documents...

Data and metadata exchange between organizations requires a common language for describing structure and content of statistical data and metadata. The SDMX consortium develops content oriented guidelines (COG) recommending harmonized cross-domain concepts and terminology to increase the...

Despite significant strides in financial development over the past decades, financial dollarization, as reflected in elevated shares of foreign currency deposits and credit in the banking system, remains common in developing economies. We study the impact of financial dollarization,...

This paper presents background work that has been the basis for the development of the market and credit risk indicators (MRI and CRI, respectively) as published in the IMF''s Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) since September 2004. The fundamental idea was to build a set of Financial...

In recent years there has been substantial theoretical and empirical work on the role that financial markets play in fostering economic growth and development. This paper provides a selective review of the literature, as well as new empirical evidence on the relationship between financial...

This paper provides a unified analysis for the onset of the 1998 financial crisis and the strong economic recovery afterward in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries. Before the crisis a banking failure arose owing to the coexistence of a lemons credit market and high government...

This paper analyzes the different channels through which financial variables and financial sector reform can affect economic growth and efficiency, using panel data for 40 countries which reformed their financial systems. Financial sector reform is hypothesized to affect economic growth and...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between long–run growth and the degree of financial development, proxied by the ratio of bank credit to the private sector as a fraction of GDP. We find that this proxy enters significantly and with a positive sign in growth regressions on a large...

The financial crisis has prompted a reconsideration of the taxation of financial institutions, with practice outstripping principle: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and several other European countries have now introduced some form of bank tax, and the U.S. administration has revived its own...