Financial development is vulnerable to social conflict. Conflict reduces the demand for domestic currency as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Conflict also leads to poor quality governance, including weak regulation of the financial system, thereby undermining the sustainability of...

The increase in the equity risk premium during the 2007–2009 Great Recession and the aging of the baby boomers in the United States have led analysts and financial industry experts to believe that risk aversion among stock investors has moved to a more-permanently higher range. If so, stocks...

The paper examines the impact of terms of trade shocks on private savings in the transition economies after accounting for the effect of other determinants. Economic agents in the transition economies are subject to tight credit constraints which are more pronounced during bad state of nature....

This paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the...

Only a successful implementation of an overall reform program will enable Russian banks to provide financial intermediation and assist in the country's development from a nascent market economy to a mature financial system. The chances for reform are better now than at any time during the last...

This paper argues that the most important question regarding the efficacy of development assistance is not how much but rather for what. Economic integration and subsidiarity provides the conditions necessary for ODA to produce higher rates of economic growth on a sustained basis.

The effect of financial openness on economic integration for two clusters of countries is estimated: the formerly planned economies of Eastern Europe and central Asia (emerging market economies) and some western advanced economies. We focus on two dimensions of economic integration: convergence...

An importance source of finance for poorer economies, is foreign aid; this paper examines some controversies surrounding its provision. The advanced economies have provided hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to the developing world over the last several decades; although this has done much...

Recent studies suggest that the allocation of expenditures in education is important for growth. The state of public education spending in many transition economies highlights the need for an assessment of the nature of education expenditures in these countries. This paper attempts to fill this...