This 2009 Article IV Consultation highlights that Singapore has been severely affected by the global downturn. The collapse in external demand has led to a sharp contraction in GDP, which fell by almost 13 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Executive Directors have observed that the floating...

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

This paper addresses the challenges to prudential supervision in highly dollarized economies, where central banks and supervisors may be constrained in the use of standard money and financial policy tools. The study’s conclusions are the basis of an ongoing policy dialogue with IMF member...

Many countries have moved towards more flexible exchange rate regimes over the last decade to take advantage of greater monetary policy autonomy and flexibility in responding to external shocks. Some reluctance to let go of pegged exchange rates persists, however, despite the benefits of...

The paper presents an N-country model with stock markets, in which a closed-form solution for the real exchange rate is derived. Risky asset prices and allocation of risky assets among countries are determined endogenously. Such a framework allows an analysis of how fundamental parameters, such...

Well-known empirical puzzles in international macroeconomics concern the large divergence of equilibrium outcomes for consumption across countries from the predictions of models with full risk sharing. It is commonly believed that these risk-sharing puzzles are related to another empirical...