Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the empirical patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries in the past two decades. This paper integrates these two...

Latin America's economies have made tremendous improvements in recent years. Following the lost decade of the 1980s, economic growth has resumed. But the fruits of this progress remain to be consolidated. The political consensus supporting reform is fragile, and the economies of the region are...

Financial innovation increases markets' liquidity and provides economic agents with new instruments to better handle risks, but it reduces the efficacy of monetary policy while strengthening the logic and force of the “unholy trinityâ€. Increased liquidity of financial markets and...

This paper presents two views of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first is that countries in the South of the Eurozone were fiscally irresponsible and failed to implement pro-competitive supply side policies. The second view holds that the crisis reflects a deep divide between the...

This article reviews the role of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its adaptability to the changing international financial structure, from the gold standard to floating exchange rates. Today, the BIS has assumed the role of creator of international standards for banks and...

This paper argues that the international monetary system will evolve into a bipolar structure consisting of a dollar area and a euro area, each of which attracting other countries to their gravitational centers. A deepening and widening of NAFTA and the EU will enlarge the sphere of influence of...