According to conventional wisdom, capital flows are fickle. Focusing on emerging markets, this paper asks whether this conventional wisdom still holds in the contemporary world. The results show that, despite recent structural and regulatory changes, much of it survives. FDI inflows are more...

How do international economic agreements influence the investment patterns of firms from emerging economies? This paper studies the ways in which bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements interact with geographic and cultural distance to influence firms' investment...

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household...

Foreign investors are increasingly important participants in the local currency sovereign bond markets of developing countries. This note provides context on the overall growth of local currency sovereign debt markets in emerging markets and the growth of foreign investor participation in these...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

This paper examines how different types of workers in seventeen middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Average employment growth slowed dramatically, particularly for wage and industrial sector workers, with corresponding increases in...

Financial globalization, defined as global linkages through cross-border financial flows, has become increasingly relevant for emerging markets as they integrate financially with the rest of the world. This paper argues that, because of the way it is often measured, it has also led to the...

The 2009 global recession demonstrated, once again, the importance of crisis prevention as well as the critical need for preserving policy room so that emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) can act when their economies are hit by shocks. And now, with the global growth outlook still...

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

This paper analyzes power utilities in 15 jurisdictions to understand the determinants of success for reforms aimed at improving financial viability and cost recovery in the power sector and the impacts of these reforms on metrics of sector performance. The analysis finds that electricity...