Agricultural development banks (AgDBs), which are not viable, should either be closed, or transformed into self-reliant, sustainable financial intermediaries. Experience shows that reform is possible. Among the prominent cases are Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) and Bank for Agriculture and...

This paper investigates whether there was a credit crunch in East Asia during the recent financial and economic crises. Motivated by widespread concern that, over and above any increases in real interest rates, corporates may have also faced credit rationing, we adopt an explicit disequilibrium...

This paper has been written to make an enormous threat known to the public. We all know about the forest fires that raged in Indonesia and parts of Malaysia in 1997, and about the noxious haze covering the whole region, but only a few experts are aware of the threat of extinction of the last...