China’s economy has expanded by leaps and bounds, with dazzling progress since it first opened to foreign investment and reform in 1978. Over the last 25 years and after a long period of economic autarky, the country has emerged as a major player in world trade. Its accession to the World...

Private capital movements have risen in recent decades, and bank flows have been part of this story. Some empirical studies have analysed the political drivers of private international liquidity, but paradoxically very few have looked at the political economy of bank flows. Even less research...

Over the past decade we have witnessed a double convergence. Aid donors have developed a growing interest in the private sector while private banks have set about creating corporate social responsibility programs, sustainable lending and microfinance programmes. As a consequence, the dialogue...

Political cycles represent a core issue for capital markets in developing and emerging countries. This paper analyses the intricate links between financial markets and emerging democracies and highlights changes in the ways analysts and investors react to political cycles in emerging markets....

The paper addresses two core questions: do investment banks’ recommendations have an impact on the allocation of portfolio flows in the emerging-markets asset class? Above all, are these recommendations related to the business of investment banks? In order to answer these questions, we...

The paper focuses on relations between experts and politicians in Latin America. It is divided into three parts. The first outlines the distinctive features of the political economy of expertise in Latin America. This provides the context to the second part, which focuses on the analysis of...

Strong growth in China and India has led to improvements in raw-material exporting countries' terms of trade and attracted complementary finance. The long-term challenge for these countries, where institutions are often fragile, is to avoid the so-called “resource curse”. This paper aims to...

This paper presents stylised facts about development aid and capital flows to developing countries. It compares their volumes and volatilities and finds that foreign aid is not the major source of finance for these countries any more, though not for all regions. The expansion of private flows...

The forces shaping the revolution in banking and capital markets have radically changed the financial landscape during the past three decades. A remarkable feature of this changing new landscape has been the astonishing rate of internationalisation of the financial system in the last two...