What caused Asia's largest economy, once the envy of the world, to lag behind many of the other industrial countries? And why did it take so long for Japan to recover from the bursting of its asset price bubble of the late 1980s? In this volume, a team from the International Monetary Fund...

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and nowhere is this truer than in the arena of international economic policy cooperation. With the world facing the largest and most synchronized plunge in output of the postwar era, policy makers banded together to find solutions. This paper looks at the...

"In the aftermath of the Lehman crisis, payouts (i.e., taxpayer bailouts) in various forms were provided by governments to a variety of financial institutions and markets that were outside the regulatory perimeter - the - "shadow" banking system. Although recent regulatory proposals attempt to...