It is not easy to untangle the logic that in the past led to creation of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and that is currently guiding the prevailing Eurozone (EZ) policies. Although lacking the right institutions, which can be seen as the ultimate root of its crisis, the ten years of the EMU...

Unlike the crisis years of 2007-2009 (when the insolvency of large banks was a major problem), the current round of the global financial crisis has fiscal origins. Almost all developed countries suffer from an excessive public debt burden that has been built up over the last two decades or more....

Several European countries face challenges reminiscent of those faced by the emerging economies of Latin America. The economic booms in some peripheral Euro-zone countries financed by large capital inflows; the credit and asset price booms and then the busts including Sudden Stops in capital...

The paper explores the view that the Asian currency and financial crises in 1997 and 1998 reflected structural and policy distortions in the countries of the region, even though market overreaction and herding caused the plunge of exchange rates, asset prices and economic activity to be more...

Within the last decade sizeable capital inflows from mature economies were accompanied by rapid financial deepening in the Western Balkans, Turkey and the CIS. Notwithstanding their considerably different initial positions most countries sustained financial stability in the first period of the...

This paper proposes a stylized two-period two-country model illustrating the role played by the distribution of domestic wealth in determining a country’s level of access to international lending. We model sovereign debt redemption policy as the outcome of the interaction between the...

This paper reviews key policy messages and warnings about developments in the run-up to the global financial and economic crisis that began in mid-2007 which are contained in the main publications of the IMF, the OECD and the BIS and discuss issues relevant to strengthening their surveillance...

Following the Great Recession, eurozone countries have performed worse than even the currency union’s most pessimistic critics had predicted. The paper identifies the strong fundamental flaws in the design of the eurozone and proposes a set of reforms, both in the structure of the eurozone and...