The rapid increase in international trade and financial integration over the past decade and the growing importance of emerging markets in world trade and GDP have inspired the IMF to place stronger emphasis on multilateral surveillance, macro-financial linkages, and the implications of...

We test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970-2006 period. Our analysis adapts Bohn's (2007) error-correction reaction function approach - which tests for a...

We test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970-2006 period. Our analysis adapts Bohn’s (2007) error-correction reaction function approach—which tests for a...

This article looks at Australia’s current account deficits in light of concerns about the role of external imbalances in the global financial crisis and the difficulties now facing a number of countries that have run large current account deficits in recent years. Australia is clearly...

This paper examines the question if the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative provides a good basis for the HIPCs to exit from repeated debt rescheduling. Building on other reviews of the HIPC Initiative, the paper begins with a short summary of some key problems of the HIPC...

Since the mid-1980s Uganda has had debt strategies, which clearly laid down procedures for negotiating new loans and emphasized commitment to reduce the stock of debt arrears. Over this period, the country went through six Paris Club negotiations and debt reduction operations. Uganda became the...

Why did Europe fail to manage the euro area crisis and what lessons can be drawn from this failure for Europe"s future? Studying the EU / IMF program that was imposed on Greece in May 2010 – the original sin of the crisis – highlights both the nature of the problem and the difficulty in...

Africa's sovereign debt markets are not well understood, partly due to a lack of data. This paper introduces the Africa Debt Database (ADD), the most granular and comprehensive dataset on external borrowing by African governments thus far. Our project moves beyond existing aggregate datasets and...

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to...