Weaknesses in the corporate sector have increasingly been cited as important factors in financial crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries. Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance and risky financing patterns as major causes of the East Asian financial crisis. And...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competition in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper the authors first estimate for 16 countries a measure...

A group of heavily indebted low-income countries (HIPCs), most in Sub-Saharan Africa, has continued to experience external debt problems. Because the HIPCs'economic characteristics and external imbalances are very different from those of middle-income countries, the analysis of debt problems and...

This paper shows that market-based financial instruments are better suited to manage external price risk for a country that is a price taker in world commodity markets. This is especially the case for mineral and energy price risks where financial instruments (such as commodity swaps) exist for...

The authors review the case for market-based debt reduction and concerted debt reduction. They explain the new menu-based approach to debt reduction and discuss why it may be preferred to market-based and concerted debt reduction. In a review of the five recent debt-reduction agreements, they...

The Brady Initiative has introduced official support for debt reduction. This new phase in the debt strategy requires a new set of tools to analyze debt deals and to study the impact of a deal on the debtor country. This paper discusses first the methodological issues involved in evaluating the...

Interest rates fell sharply after Mexico's Brady deal, and private investment and growth recovered. The authors show that the main benefit of debt relief was not to lower expected payments but to reduce uncertainty. Reduced uncertainty was found to be the dominant factor in explaining the...

Using bank-level data, the authors apply the Panzar and Rosse (1987) methodology to estimate the extent to which changes in input prices are reflected in revenues earned by specific banks in 50 countries'banking systems. They then relate this competitiveness measure to indicators of...

The development of government bond markets and, in particular, their currency composition have recently received much interest, partly because of their relation with financial crises. The authors study the determinants of the size and currency composition of government bond markets for a panel...

East Asia's financial crisis has been attributed in part to the weak performance and risky financial structures of Asian corporations. In the period before Asia's financial crisis, however, analysts were not suggesting that the financial structure of many East Asian corporations would be unable...