The more severe a financial crisis, the greater has been the likelihood of its management under an IMF-supported programme and the shorter the time from crisis onset to programme initiation. Political links to the United States have increased programme likelihood but have prompted faster...

This paper assesses that participation of countries in IMF programs significantly diminishes their vulnerability to external shocks. Currently, one of the primary purposes of the IMF is to ensure global stability. As such, the Fund has the responsibility of advising member countries on the...

The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the...

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most violent region in the world, with an annual homicide rate of more than 20 per 100,000 population and with an increasing trend. Yet most evidence of crime concentration, geo-temporal patterns, and event dependence comes from cities in high-income...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from reductions in barriers to trade. However, the empirical basis for judging trade reforms is weak. Econometrics are mostly ad hoc; results are typically not judged against models; policies are poorly measured;...