Economic performance in many emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) improved substantially over the past twenty years. The past decade was particularly good—for the first time EMDEs spent more time in expansion and had smaller downturns thanadvanced economies. In this paper we...

International trade collapsed in 2008–09, particularly in countries that experienced a financial crisis. Was this collapse unique or part of a broader historical pattern? Using an augmented gravity model and 179 episodes from 1970 to 2009, we find that financial crises are associated with...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

"Recent studies have found that capital moves 'uphill' from poor to rich countries, and brings little or no growth dividend when it does flow into poor economies. We show that Europe does not conform to this paradigm. In the European experience of financial integration, capital has flown from...

The central challenges facing the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia as they work to catch up to advanced European Union (EU) income levels are discussed in this new book. Focusing on the region’s growth performance, and outlining two...

Previous early-warning systems (EWSs) for currency crises have relied on models that require a priori dating of crises. This paper proposes an alternative EWS, based on a Markov-switching model, which identifies and characterizes crisis periods endogenously; this also allows the model to utilize...

This paper introduces a new database of financial reforms, covering 91 economies over 1973–2005. It describes the content of the database, the information sources utilized, and the coding rules used to create an index of financial reform. It also compares the database with other measures of...

Despite stops, gaps, and reversals, financial reforms advanced worldwide in the last quarter century. Using a new index of financial liberalization, we conclude that influential events shook the status quo, inducing both reforms and reversals, while learning, more so than ideology and country...