We use data on the extent to which residents of one country hold the bonds of issuers resident in another as a measure of financial integration or interrelatedness, asking how Asia compares with Europe and Latin America and with the base case in which the purchaser and issuer of the bonds reside...

This Selected Issues paper on Kuwait reviews its economic development strategy and uses a variety of analytical methods to highlight Kuwait’s policy challenges and their effectiveness. Kuwait has accumulated large fiscal surpluses, enabling it to build up a sizable asset position for...

In this paper, we adopt a cross-country perspective to examine the evolution of capital flows into China, both in terms of volumes and composition. China's inflows have generally been dominated by foreign direct investment (FDI), a pattern that appears to be favorable in light of the recent...

This paper focuses on the use of participatory notes (PNs) by foreign investors, as a conduit for portfolio flows into Indian equity markets for more than a decade. The broadening of India's foreign investor base, in recent years, has a bias towards hedge funds/unregistered foreign investors who...

We demonstrate empirically that not all capital flows influence exchange rates equally: Capital flows induced by foreign investors’ stock market transactions have both an economically significant and a permanent impact on exchange rates, whereas capital flows induced by foreign...

Emerging market policy makers have been concerned about the financial stability implications of financial globalization. These concerns are focused on behavior under stressed conditions. Do tail events in the home country trigger off extreme responses by foreign investors – are foreign...

China's dramatic success in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) has raised concerns that it has success diverted FDI from other countries in Asia. We develop a new methodology to estimate crowding out, and we use it to investigate the impact of China's emergence on FDI flows to Asia using...

This paper analyzes various indicators of the U.S. international investment position from a portfolio perspective. The 1990s saw a decline in home bias, which, coupled with rapid financial deepening, led to a large increase in gross international investment holdings. The home bias of non-U.S....

The paper provides a systematic analysis of bilateral, source and host factors driving portfolio equity investment across countries, using newly-released data on international equity holdings at the end of 2001. It develops a model that links bilateral equity holdings to bilateral trade in goods...

Aid is primarily given to governments whereas the engine of sustained growth is the private sector. It is therefore illusory to investigate the impact of aid on growth without considering the impact of government interventions on the private sector. The model shows how these interventions...