Lack of private investment is a serious policy problem in many developing countries, especially in Africa. Despite recent structural reform and stabilization, the investment response to date has been mixed, even among the strongest reformers. The role of poor infrastructure and deficient public...

The debates surrounding the recent East Asian crisis have focused not only on causes but also on policy actions in the wake of the initial shock. This has raised questions about the relationship between monetary policy and market confidence. Specifically, would rising interest rates bolster or...

After being excluded from world capital markets during the debt crisis, many developing countries have experienced large capital inflows in the past five years. The challenges these inflows pose for domestice policy have generated a substantial literature. The authors review and extend that...

The 1990s brought developing countries the heaviest private capital flows since the early 1980s, says the author - mainly bond and equity financing, rather than medium- and long-term lending by commercial banks. Flows were mainly to Asia in the first half and Latin America in the second half....

Typically the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is analyzed from a macroeconomic perspective, to examine the implications for capital market flows or for the aggregate degree of financial integration. This analysis often involves examining whether certain conditions of...

Countries differ in the extent to which their financial systems are bank-based or market-based. The financial systems of Germany and Japan, for example, are considered bank-based because banks play a leading role in mobilizing savings, allocating capital, overseeing investment decisions of...

The authors study the effect of financial crises on trade credit in a sample of 890 firms in six emerging economies. They find that although provision of trade credit increases right after the crisis, it consequently collapses in the following months and years. The authors observe that firms...

The author presents theory and calculations to show that part of the explanation of slow growth in many poor countries is not that governments did not spend on investment, but that these investments did not create productive capital. For a variety of reasons governments take resources from...

The main purpose of this paper is to survey the existing literature on alternative finance (AF) and indicate the major research gaps. In this way, the survey may help to identify the factors influencing the flow of AF; provide analytical, and empirically supported underpinnings for policy work;...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has played a major role in China's push toward a market-oriented economy. Recent inflows account for 40 percent of combined flows of FDI to all developing countries, making China the biggest developing country FDI recipient. This record is impressive, but certain...