Six years into the debt crisis, questions about the relevance of policy measures to alleviate the crisis still abound. Conditionality by international financial institutions and rescheduling by commercial creditors have been dismissed in favor of debt reduction as strategies for restoring the...

The authors review the case for market-based debt reduction and concerted debt reduction. They explain the new menu-based approach to debt reduction and discuss why it may be preferred to market-based and concerted debt reduction. In a review of the five recent debt-reduction agreements, they...

The Brady Initiative has introduced official support for debt reduction. This new phase in the debt strategy requires a new set of tools to analyze debt deals and to study the impact of a deal on the debtor country. This paper discusses first the methodological issues involved in evaluating the...

Private investors have an important role toplay in the ongoing process of reform in Eastern Europe. So external creditworthiness is crucial to a successful transition. Large government borrowing crowds out the formation of private contracts between international investors and domestic...

To solve the puzzle of attitudes toward debt buybacks, the authors use a model that combines considerations of debt overhang with the possibility of asymmetrical information between debtor countries and their creditors. In this environment, a debt overhang may create disincentives for a country...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the choice by debtor countries of a jointly optimal trade and debt strategy after the occurrence of some negative shocks. Choosing between export promotion and import substitution is a matter of determining whether it is more profitable to increase the...

The authors theoretically analyze country funds, focusing on emerging economies in which capital markets are not readily accessible to outside investors. They study country-fund pricing and the associated policy implications under alternative variations on segmentation of international markets....

When sovereign debt trades at a discount on secondary markets, a market buyback increases the secondary market price. The wealth of private creditors increases because part of the funds used in the repurchase is a transfer payment to them. This transfer of resources can be mitigated by imposing...

The author estimate the costs and benefits of labor retrenchment in state-owned industrial enterprises in China. Their results indicate the prevalence of low and stagnant labor productivity, low capital productivity, and excessively high wages in the state sector for the period reviewed...

Closed-end national index funds (NIFs of country funds) invest primarily in the stocks of the originating countries, such as Brazil, India, and the Republic of Korea. They are typically traded in the organized exchanges of industrial countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom....