In a speech to the European Parliament on 18th February 1987 the Commission President Delors publicly announced the Commission's proposals for a fundamental reorganization of the system of financing the Community and of Community budgetary policy. What is the background of these proposals? How...

The following paper addresses the ongoing debate on the questions of the composition and financing of the European Union's common budget. The authors argue in favour of a significant enlargement of the budget, together with a profound reform of its composition and financing.

The fiscal framework needs in practice to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, effective budgetary rules that allow governments to commit to sound policies and, on the other, judgements and discretion in how these are applied so that the framework adequately reflects the complexity of the...

The lending criteria applied by the IMF and the World Bank have been converging for some time. Considering also that since the floating of exchange rates in the early seventies the IMF seems to have lost in importance as a monetary institution, debate is growing on the question of whether the...

Growth in Latin America in the 1980s was much slower than it had been in previous decades and real resource transfer has been negative since 1983. What are the chances that this situation will change in the nineties? Where can the necessary development finance come from? Can bottlenecks be avoided?

Islamic banking, where fixed interest contracts are banned, needs if it is to be successful to operate within a type of financial system in which bank-industry relationships are sufficiently close and pervasive for profit- and loss-sharing arrangements to be acceptable to both sides. However,...

Following the introduction of its structural adjustment loans the World Bank became the object of the criticism that had until then been directed only at the IMF and its stabilisation and adjustment programmes. This article shows that structural adjustment loans do in fact take the traditional...