Countries and international organizations working on longer-range development issues depend on long-term quantitative projections and scenario analysis. Such forecasting has become increasingly challenging, thanks to the rapid pace of globalization, technological progress, the interplay among...

During the crises of the 1990s, emerging economies usually lacked the policy tools to deal with external shocks that were available to advanced economies. Worldwide turbulent episodes found most emerging economies unable to perform countercyclical policies and, in many cases, their own...

Drawing on the lessons from the global financial crisis and especially from its impact on the banking systems of Eastern Europe, the paper proposes a new practical approach to macroprudential stress testing. The proposed approach incorporates: (i) macroeconomic stress scenarios generated from...

The accumulated experience of emerging markets over the past two decades has laid bare the tenuous links between external financial integration and faster growth, on the one hand, and the proclivity of such integration to fuel costly crises on the other. These crises have not gone without...

This paper discusses the theoretical arguments in favor of and against economic globalization and, with a view to ascertaining whether Latin America may be able to capture the globalization upside, examines the trends and salient features of Latin America's globalization as compared with that of...

Bank credit to Egypt's private sector decreased over the last decade, despite a recapitalized banking system and high rates of economic growth. Recent macro-economic turmoil has reinforced the trend. This paper explains the decrease based on credit supply and demand considerations by 1)...

As the recovery in high-income countries firms amid a gradual withdrawal of extraordinary monetary stimulus, developing countries can expect stronger demand for their exports as global trade regains momentum, but also rising interest rates and potentially weaker capital inflows. This paper...

This paper examines spending plans suggested by the recent literature regarding Dutch disease and examines their implications to Niger relative to its expanding mineral sector. The key to the benefits of significant mineral revenue lies with the productivity and supply responses of spending. If...

The main goal of the paper is to examine whether surges in private capital inflows lead to credit booms. The authors built a quarterly database on gross capital inflows, credit to the private sector, and other macro-financial indicators for a sample of 71 countries from 1975q1 to 2010q4....

This paper analyzes the evolution of sovereign credit ratings in the wake of the global financial crisis by studying changes in actual, shadow, and relative ratings between 2008 and 2012. For countries that do not have a rating from the major rating agencies, shadow ratings are estimated as a...