The dramatic events of the late 1990s, which followed a wave of financial crises going back to the early 1980s, brought to center stage the issue of financial sector policy in developing countries. Many recent books have presented a chronology and interpretation of the crises, but it is little...

The volume is divided into five traditional areas of finance: the macroeconomy, banking, securities markets, pension issues, and regulations. Four cross-cutting messages emerge. First, the erosion of national frontiers by trade, tourism, migration, and capital account liberalization means that...

Making Finance Work for Africa presents a coherent policy approach that addresses African priorities and can work in African conditions. It challenges the applicability of some conventional views on a range of issues from securities markets and banking regulation to the organization of...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on how financial sector policy can help the poor. It is often thought that promotion of specialized microfinance institutions is the best or only way forward. However, a strong mainstream financial system is also pro-poor-perhaps even more so: while...

This volume examines the possibilities and pitfalls to successful financial sector tax reform from theoretical, empirical and practical perspectives. It explores the possibilities and limitations of "big ideas" such as removal of all capital income taxation, the application of VAT to financial...

Attempts to raise a significant percentage of gross domestic product in revenue from a broad-based financial transactions tax are likely to fail both by raising much less revenue than expected and by generating far-reaching changes in economic behavior. Although the side-effects would include a...

There is constant demand for an estimate of the likely fiscal costs of future banking crises, but little precision can be expected in such an estimate. The author shows how information that is typically available to authorities could be used to get a general sense of the order of magnitude of...

Enthusiasts for financial sector tax reform typically come either with some form of"flat tax"(including value added tax on financial services, zero taxation on capital income, or a universal transactions tax) or advocating corrective taxes designed to offset market failures or achieve other...