Inflation persists at moderate rates of 15-30 percent in all the countries that successfully reduced triple digit inflations in the 1980s. Several other countries, for example Colombia, have experienced moderate inflation for prolonged periods. In this paper we first set out theories of...

Post-1945 Europe had many of the traits observed today in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: price controls, shortages, black markets and a monetary overhang. The policy response in most countries was monetary reform - - the deliberate immobilization of liquid assets and in many instances an...

Macroeconomic populism is an approach to economics that emphasizes growth and income distribution and deemphasizes the risks of inflation and deficit finance, external constraints and the reaction of economic agents to aggressive non-market policies. The purpose of our paper is to show that...

Financial factors have been assigned strategic importance in economic development. But very different factors have been isolated in the respective experiences: in Asia unrepressed financial markets in mobilizing saving and allocating investment have been given prominence. In Latin America the...

We review ten aspects of how floating exchange rates have worked in practice, contrasted with ten characteristics that the system was supposed to have in theory. We conclude that the foreign exchange market is characterized by high transactions-volume, short-term horizons, and an absence of...

The paper reviews the Argentine debt experience in the past ten years. The emphasis is on the interaction between relative prices, financial instability, budget .deficits, inflation and debt accumulation. A longer run perspective shows that the continuing fiscal problems have stood in the way of...

We review the literature on resolving bank and corporate sector crises to identify government policies that affect the depth of a crisis and the ease and sustainability of recovery, and to analyze their fiscal cost. A consistent framework - including sufficient resources for loss-absorption and...

This paper investigates stock performance in emerging markets in relation to their accessibility by foreign investors (as measured by the investability index of the IFC). Using the Stehle (1977) model, we reject for most markets integration and fail to reject for all segmentation. We find that...

This study quantifies the importance of a Global Financial Cycle (GFCy) for capital flows. We use capital flow data dis-aggregated by direction and type between 1990Q1 and 2015Q5 for 85 countries, and conventional techniques, models and metrics. Since the GFCy is an unobservable concept, we use...

The recent financial crisis has shown how interconnected the financial world has become. Shocks in one location or asset class can have a sizable impact on the stability of institutions and markets around the world. But systemic risk analysis is severely hampered by the lack of consistent data...