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...

Good progress has been made in stabilizing the economic and social situation since the crisis. Fiscal adjustment over a prolonged period will bring the public finances to a sustainable path. To protect social expenditures and allow higher public investment, a comprehensive tax reform is...

Bangladesh achieved steady gross domestic product growth with manageable inflation, and improved social indicators, owing to prudent macroeconomic management and a renewal of structural reform. The proposed Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility-supported program builds on this record of policy...

This paper outlines a way to estimate transition matrices for use in credit risk modeling with a decades-old methodology that uses aggregate proportions data. This methodology is ideal for credit-risk applications where there is a paucity of data on changes in credit quality, especially at an...

Policymakers' uneasiness about granting independence to financial sector regulators stems to a large extent from the lack of familiarity with, and elusiveness of, the concept of accountability. This paper gives operational content to accountability and argues that it is possible to do so in a...

In contrast to corporate defaults, regulators typically take a number of statutory actions to avoid the large fiscal costs associated with bank defaults. The distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk, ignores such regulatory actions. To overcome this...

A rapidly growing empirical literature is studying the causes and consequences of bank fragility in present-day economies. The paper reviews the two basic methodologies adopted in cross-country empirical studies-the signals approach and the multivariate probability model-and their application to...

The global financial crisis has placed the spotlight squarely on bank stress tests. Stress tests conducted in the lead-up to the crisis, including those by IMF staff, were not always able to identify the right risks and vulnerabilities. Since then, IMF staff has developed more robust stress...

The Nigerian financial system underwent a banking crisis in 2008–09, owing to the global financial crisis and domestic events. The decisive crisis response effectively stabilized the banking system, but the challenge now is to devise a credible exit strategy. The Central Bank of Nigeria...

The Mongolian financial system is dominated by commercial banks. The nonbank financial sector, including insurance and the stock market, is small. The current level of dollarization exposes Mongolia’s financial system to risk. The authorities are in the process of establishing the...