Financial integration among economies has the benefit of improving allocation efficiency and diversifying risk. However the recent global financial crisis, considered as the worst since the Great Depression has re-ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its...

Over the past decade, development policy has witnessed a clear shift towards a poverty reduction agenda. Unsurprisingly, this has been accompanied by changes in views concerning development finance. A dominant refrain of the present agenda is that ‘traditional’ approaches to development...

Following an analysis of the forces behind the global capital flows paradoxʺ observed in the era of advancing financial globalization, this paper sets out to investigate the opportunity costs of self-insurance through precautionary reserve holdings. We reject the idea of reserves as low-cost...