Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Creditworthiness and credit risks -- Between promise and peril : credit and debt at the pearl fisheries of South India and Sri Lanka, c. 1800 / Sam Ostroff -- Lenders and borrowers in a non-capitalist economy : Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century /...

International comparisons reveal that - even controlling for a host of explanatory factors - credit depth is exceptionally low in Mexico. Using panel data methods linking credit growth and fundamentals, this paper estimates a long-term gap between actual and expected credit of about 40 percent...

Over the past 20 years, China has granted a conspicuous amount of loans to African countries. New loan data show that compared to Western multilateral loans, Chinese loans have relatively high interest rates and shorter maturities, tend to be highly collateralized, and are volatile over time....

Credit is key to support healthy and sustainable economic growth but excess aggregate credit growth can signal the build-up of imbalances and lead to systemic financial crisis. Hence, monitoring the credit cycle is key to identifying vulnerabilities, particularly in emerging markets, which tend...