Firm surveys often indicate that firms complain a lot about lack of access to financial services, but financing constraints are difficult to identify, given demand and supply considerations and with only surveys based on firms'perceptions. Specifically, it is difficult to separate demand for...

Researchers and policymakers have in recent years paid considerable attention to the phenomenon of capital flight. Researchers have focused on four questions: What concept should be used to measure capital flight? What figure for capital flight will emerge, using this measure? Can the occurrence...

Banking markets are becoming increasingly international through financial liberalization and general economic integration. Using bank-level data for 80 countries for 1988-95, the authors examine the extent of foreign ownership in national banking markets. They compare net interest margins,...

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...

Politics and regulatory capture can play an important role in financial institutions'distress. East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed and closed financial intermediaries in an environment with many links between government, politicians, supervisors, and financial institutions....

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 market prices of developing countries'debts are imperfect indicators of the countries'payment capacity for three reasons: the concave shape of the debt's payoff structure, the presence of third-party guarantees, and the differences in the terms of various debt claims. Claessens and Pennacchi...

The author surveys the literature on equity portfolio investment to develop a research agenda that could help developing countries interested in attracting equity portfolio flows. He finds that a broad literature exists on equity portfolio flows, but that most empirical tests have focused on...