This paper discusses, in a very general way, a system of IMF insurance against sovereign default that could be offered to private lenders and banking groups. The system could overcome many of the current issues that plague the international private lending market, such as moral hazard on the...

Within the last decade sizeable capital inflows from mature economies were accompanied by rapid financial deepening in the Western Balkans, Turkey and the CIS. Notwithstanding their considerably different initial positions most countries sustained financial stability in the first period of the...

This paper critically evaluates the existing empirical literature on creditor moral hazard in sovereign bond markets, proposes a unified theoretical approach to test for IMF-induced creditor moral hazard, and provides empirical evidence, using daily sovereign bond market spreads of Indonesia and...

In contrast to Robert Mundell's Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming a monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries - most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland -...

Multilateral development finance is at a critical juncture. In the past 70 years, it has developed through four distinct stages. The Bretton Woods conference established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1944 to finance post-war reconstruction and stabilize the global...

Several European countries face challenges reminiscent of those faced by the emerging economies of Latin America. The economic booms in some peripheral Euro-zone countries financed by large capital inflows; the credit and asset price booms and then the busts including Sudden Stops in capital...

This paper is interested in linking formally external disequilibriums to the sovereign debt crisis the EMU is experiencing since 2009. Relying on the CHEER approach that connects the goods market to the capital market, we show that when a country belonging to a monetary union faces external...

This paper analyses the history and effectiveness of the two major mechanisms of resolution of balance of payments crisis. It argues that IMF lending has met its counter-cyclical objectives through history and has been improving in terms of providing adequate lending facilities as well as...

The author studies the welfare implications of adjustment programs supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He uses a model where an endogenous borrowing constraint, set up by international lenders who will never lend more than a debt ceiling, forces the borrowing economy to always...

The Greek government budget situation plays a central role in the debt crisis in the euro area. The debt to GDP ratio is above 150 percent, while the deficit to GDP ratio exceeds 10 percent. To re-establish the Maastricht criteria, respectively, strong consolidation measures need to be...