We develop an early-warning model of sovereign debt crises. A country is defined to be in a debt crisis if it is classified as being in default by Standard & Poor's, or if it has access to nonconcessional IMF financing in excess of 100 percent of quota. By means of logit and binary recursive...

Several models establish a positive association between public debt ratios and long-term real yields, but the empirical evidence is not always conclusive. We reconsider this issue, focusing in particular on possible spillover effects of large advanced economies' debt levels to other economies'...

This paper analyzes the impact of the global crisis on six South-Eastern European countries. The main objective is to compare macro-financial conditions and policies in the run-up to the crisis as well as to compare the policy responses to it, so as to highlight, inter alia, possible...

The paper examines fiscal sustainability issues for the case of Eritrea but has wider implications for addressing fiscal and debt sustainability. It begins with a formal definition and explanation of analytical sustainability indicators, followed by an assessment of the causes of fiscal deficits...

We develop a new public domestic debt (DD) database covering 93 low-income countries and emerging markets over the 1975-2004 period to estimate the growth impact of DD. Moderate levels of non-inflationary DD, as a share of GDP and bank deposits, are found to exert a positive overall impact on...

Conventional economic policy models focus only on selected elements of the central bank balance sheet, in particular monetary liabilities and sometimes foreign reserves. The canonical model of an "independent" central bank assumes that it chooses money (or an interest rate), unconstrained by a...

On occasion, a government may find itself confronted with a need to address a large contingent or off balance sheet fiscal liability. Implementing a settlement raises issues of fiscal sustainability and macroeconomic stability. This paper surveys the key design issues, and draws lessons from...

This paper contains an empirical investigation of the set of economic and political conditions that are associated with a likely occurrence of a sovereign debt crisis. We use a new statistical approach (Binary Recursive Tree) that allows us to derive a collection of "rules of thumb" that help...

The recent recovery in Latin America has been impressive but also raises the question whether this represents a fundamental break with the region's history of boom-bust cycles. The paper traces how this history of macroeconomic volatility and financial crisis over the past century has adversely...

The interest rate-growth differential (IRGD) shows a marked correlation with GDP per capita. It has been on average around 1 percentage point for large advanced economies during 1999-2008; but below -7 percentage points among non-advanced economies - exerting a powerful stabilizing influence on...