Remittances are a sizeable source of external financing for developing countries. In the L’Aquila 2009 G8 Summit, leaders pledged to reduce the cost of remittances by half in 5 years (from 10 to 5 percent). Yet, empirically, little is known about what drives the cost of remittances. Using...

This paper analyzes the finances of Egypt's listed firms and the performance of the Egyptian stock exchange during the period 2003-07/08. Egyptian companies can be clearly divided into a top tier and a second tier. Egypt's top tier of listed firms tends to finance themselves mainly from...

This paper shows how badly a market economy may respond to a positive productivity shock in an environment with asymmetric information about project quality: some, all, or even more than all the benefits from the increase in productivity may be dissipated. In the model, based on Bernanke and...

A notable contrast in modern economic history has been the rapid economic growth of China and the slower and volatile economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the engagement between the two continues to grows, there will be a greater cross-fertilization of experiences. Total factor productivity...

This paper provides an overview of the period prior to the recent global crisis, and the policies that were adopted around the world in response to the crisis. It highlights a number of key issues regarding economic and financial policies that governments have faced both globally and nationally....

Traditional narratives of external imbalances have focused on the analysis of national accounts, trade flows, and financial flows. They have generated two opposing views of the current situation of the world economy: on one side, a prudent, if not pessimistic view considers large imbalances as...

Management of international monetary relations between China and the United States will be one of the crucial parameters for the stability or instability of the global financial system in the next decade. Although most of the literature suggests rebalancing through either adjustment of relative...

The paper discusses the main features that distinguish inter-firm international trade finance from alternative sources of financing. On the one hand, inter-firm trade finance could help overcome informational problems associated with other lending relationships; on the other, it may contribute...

This paper uses the central tool of an investment-savings and monetary-policy model with an augmented Philips curve and presents a few extensions of that model to analyze the multiplier effects of macroeconomic policies in the United States. In doing so, the authors incorporate realistic...

Cambodia's growth over 1998-2008 has been remarkable (almost 10 percent per annum for a decade). This paper applies a"growth diagnostic"approach to understand how this happened and how it can be sustained. Past growth has been driven by the coincidence of a set of historical and geographic...