The paper presents the main features of the new macroeconomic imbalances procedure (MIP) as well as the MIP scoreboard for the surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances. The main issues under review are the relevance to use the MIP scoreboard as a tool to assess the vulnerabilities and imbalances...

The paper presents the main features of the new macroeconomic imbalances procedure (MIP) as well as the MIP scoreboard for the surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances. The main issues under review are the relevance to use the MIP scoreboard as a tool to assess the vulnerabilities and imbalances...

The volatility that has hit many middle-income countries (MICs) after liberalizimg their financial markets has prompted critics to call for new policies to stabilize these boom-bust cycles. But, as Aaron Tornell and Frank Westermann point out in this book, over the last two decades most of the...

The Philippines is dominated by large business conglomerates whose success has been largely attributed to an underlying assumption that these business families had a financial institution as the backbone for all their diverse business holdings. The lucrative nature of providing financial...

Since the Latin American debt crisis of the early 80s, country risk analysis has accounted for a significant part of the work of research and risk management departments of banks, insurance companies, rating agencies, financial market regulators, and multinational companies.Country risk is a...

The extreme levels of stock price volatility found during the Great Depression have often been attributed to political uncertainty. This paper performs an explicit test of the Merton/Schwert hypothesis that doubts about the survival of the capitalist system were partly responsible. It does so by...

The Chinese banking system, characterized by massive government intervention, poor asset quality and low capitalization, has started a reform process based on three main pillars: (i) bank restructuring, through the cleaning-up of non-performing loans and public capital injections, particularly...

The motor vehicle industry has undergone important changes in recent years, including a shift in production from autos to light trucks and growth of vehicle leasing. This paper uses household-level data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances to document changes in households'...

This paper documents the Doi Moi economic reform process in the financial sector in Vietnam over the last two decades and investigates the impacts of financial development, financial investments including foreign direct investment, domestic state and private investment on economic performance....

In the past several years, the ten new Central and Eastern European members of the European Union have enjoyed rapid growth but frequently alongside growing external imbalances. Economists have pointed to rising vulnerabilities, but markets compressed sovereign bond yields. This paper examines...