This paper discusses key findings of the financial sector stability assessment for Romania. The assessment reveals that in recent years, Romania’s financial sector regulatory authorities have made significant progress in adopting international best practices, including through...

The author proposes security transaction charge on secondary market and the charge so collected should be deposited in special fund for the corporate under the “Value Kinetic Safety Fund”. The fund so collected in form of Security Transaction Charge (STC) should be maintained, supervised &...

In just over a decade after independence, the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have transformed themselves into fully functioning, small open-market economies that will be joining the European Union. Capital Markets and Financial Intermediation in The Baltics analyzes the...

This paper examines empirically U.S. broad money demand emphasizing the role of financial market risk. We find that money demand rises with the liquidity risk of stock markets or the credit risk of corporate bond markets. After controlling for the effect of financial market risk, money demand...

This paper takes stock of the current state of development of the financial systems in five Central European transition economies (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and Slovenia) that are also leading EU accession candidates. It presents both a progress report and an...

The Kingdom of Bahrain’s Financial System Stability Assessment highlights banking supervision, insurance supervision, securities regulation, and antimoney laundering and combating the financing of terrorism. The banking sector is well capitalized. Asset quality has been improving and...

This Selected Issues paper on Kuwait reviews its economic development strategy and uses a variety of analytical methods to highlight Kuwait’s policy challenges and their effectiveness. Kuwait has accumulated large fiscal surpluses, enabling it to build up a sizable asset position for...

This paper provides evidence of transmission of information from the U.S. and Japan to Korean and Thai equity markets during the period from 1995 through 2000. Information is defined as important macroeconomic announcements in the U.S., Japan, Korea, and Thailand. Using high-frequency intraday...