This paper aims to examine the effect of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance on sovereign funding costs, with a focus on emerging countries, especially in Asia. We find that better ESG performance is associated with lower default risk, and therefore lower funding costs. We...

This paper looks at the development of the banking sector in emerging East Asia in the 10 years since the financial crisis of 1997/98. It suggests that the health of banking sectors in the region has improved substantially, with key changes including increased foreign ownership, movement into...

The 1990s have witnessed pronounced boom-bust cycles in emerging-markets lending, culminating in the Asian financial and currency crisis of 1997-98. By examining the links between sovereign credit ratings and dollar bond yield spreads over 1989-97, this paper aims at broad empirical content for...

We examine the determinants of capital flows to four developing countries during the 1990s using an explicitly disequilibrium econometric framework in which the supply and demand for capital are not necessarily equal and the actual amount of the flow is determined by the ‘short side’ of the...

This paper-consisting of a regional study and seven country studies-reviews the state of domestic public debt markets in Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama as at end-2005. Although they account for the lion's share of capital markets, regional...