The practice of trading across international borders has undergone a series of changes with great consequences for the world trading community, the result of new trade agreements, a number of financial crises, the emergence of the World Trade Organization, and countless other less obvious...

The reform in Asian financial sectors-especially in banking and stock markets-has been remarkable since the currency crisis of 1997-98. East Asia is now a major player in international finance, providing serious competition to the more traditional financial centers of London and New York....

Managing fiscal policy-the revenues and spending of an individual nation-is among the most challenging tasks facing governments. Wealthy countries are constrained by complex regulation and taxation policies, while developing nations often face high inflation and trade taxes. In this volume,...

This paper analyzes the financial implications of the 1956 crisis of nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt. It examines the regional distribution of public employment in Italy. The paper quantifies the impact of changes in the U.S. monetary policy on sovereign bond spreads in emerging...

This paper presents details of a symposium on forecasting performance I organized under the auspices of the IMF Staff Papers. The assumption that the forecaster's goal is to do as well as possible in predicting the actual outcome is sometimes questionable. ln the context of private sector...

Forty years ago, Marcus Fleming and Robert Mundell developed independent models of macroeconomic policy in open economies. Why do we link the two, and why do we call the result the Mundell-Fleming, rather than Fieming-Mundell model?

This paper explores sources of the output collapse in Russia during transition. A modified growth-accounting framework is developed that takes into account changes in factor utilization that are typical of the transition process. The results indicate that declines in factor inputs and...

Currency crises are difficult to predict. It could be that we are choosing the wrong variables or using the wrong models or adopting measurement techniques not up to the task. We set up a Monte Carlo experiment designed to evaluate the measurement techniques. In our study, the methods are given...

This paper examines sources of economic growth in East Asia. The conventional growth-accounting approach to estimating the sources of economic growth requires unrealistically strong assumptions about either competitiveness of factor markets or the form of the underlying aggregate production...