The authors analyze the role of institutions in resolving systemic banking crises for a broad sample of countries. Banking crises are fiscally costly, especially when policies like substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantees on financial institutions’ liabilities, and...

Building reliable institutions that support a market system is widely believed to be critical to a successful economic transition. The authors present indicators on the predictability of the institutional framework across twenty transition economies -including indicators of the predictability of...

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

The role of monetary balances in economic growth has long been a topic of macroeconomic research. This paper examines the role of real money balances in an aggregate production function of a developing economy, Colombia. Colombia is an interesting case to analyze for several reasons. First,...

The experience of countries in transition from a planned to a market-oriented economy has varied greatly. The clearest differences are between the East Asian countries, China and Vietnam, and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). China and Vietnam...

The authors investigate the link between financial crises and industry growth. They analyze data from 19 industrial and developing countries that have experienced financial crises during the past 30 years to investigate how financial crises affect sectors dependent on external sources of...

Political change marked the difference between the approaches of the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU). The Baltics and most Eastern European countries wanted to break away from communism and the FSU domination--so their transition was characterized first by political...

The authors analyze whether political freedom and civil liberties help or hinder economic liberalization, using panel data from 25 post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union between 1992 and 1997. Building on arguments and counter-arguments put forth in...

The authorexamines a range of cross-sectional variation in performance and policies for evidence on what distinguishes successes from failures. At about 6 percent, the growth rate of the Four Tigers - Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China) - are among the largest...

The authors study the empirical, cross-country relationship between macroeconomic volatility and long-run economic growth. They address four central questions: 1) Does the volatility-growth link depend on country and policy characteristics, such as the level of development or trade openness? 2)...