International capital markets are far from functioning perfectly. During the last decade, they overshot both ways: The earlier boom of private capital flows to emerging market economies (EMEs) turned out to be the prelude to the drama of seriously impaired access to foreign capital in the late...

The world is experiencing its worst recession in 80 years. What started as US sub-prime financial turmoil has developed into the first global recession since the infamous 'Great Depression' of the early 1930s. However gloomy the perspectives for the very short term are, there will be a recovery...

This paper analyzes the performance and the specialization pattern of Brazil's exports compared to a selected group in emerging countries - China, South Korea, India, Mexico and Russia - in 1996-2007, based on the sophistication level of exported goods according to the methodology of Hausmann,...

Ist Südostasien anders? Dieser Frage geht Rainer Schweickert in der Kieler Studie 306 nach. Seine Analyse der Leistungsbilanzen, ihrer Teilkomponenten und ihrer Determinanten seit Anfang der 70er Jahre sowie der krisenhaften Entwicklungen in den 90er Jahren weist nach, dass diese Vermutung in...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

Most emerging market central banks have adopted inflation targeting as their monetary policy system. The heart of inflation targeting system is inflation expectations. The success of a central bank in achieving targets depends on to the extent to which inflation expectations are formed by the...

The world is experiencing its worst recession in 80 years. What started as US sub-prime financial turmoil has developed into the first global recession since the infamous "Great Depression" of the early 1930s. However gloomy the perspectives for the very short term are, there will be a recovery...

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is...