The recent Thai boom has been accomplished in an economy with considerable openness to external forces. Despite the fiscal correction achieved during 1986-89, the domestic demand expansion has made itself felt in a widening of the current account deficit. While this deficit partly reflects the...

Mexico's Telmex undertook the first future-flow securitization transaction in 1987. From then through 1999, the principal credit rating agencies rated more than 200 transactions totaling $47.3 billion. Studying several sources, the authors draw conclusions about the rationale for using this...

The authors study how contagion affects bank lending spreads and fluctuations in output in Argentina. They analyze what determines bank lending spreads when verification and enforcement costs for loan contracts are high. They present estimates of a vector auto-regression model that relates bank...

Ever since the debt crisis of 1982, commercial banks continue to be reluctant in lending to developing countries. It is often argued that regulatory pressures on commercial banks have also contributed to the banks'reduced exposure to developing countries. This paper explores this possibility,...

Reforms to improve both the level and the efficiency of financial inter-mediation in Brazil should be high on Brazilian policymakers'agendas, because of the financial sector's importance to economic growth. This means that Brazil must also improve the legal and regulatory environment in which...

This paper presents a model that integrates intertemporal and forward-looking behavior in investment and consumption decisions in a multisectoral general equilibrium framework applicable to developing countries. It formulates and uses an infinite-horizon growth model to examine the adjustment,...

It is easy to say that the International Monetary Fund should not resort to financial rescue for countries in crisis; this is hard to do when there is no alternative. That is where collective action clauses come in. Collective action clauses are designed to facilitate debt restructuring by the...

The author examines the theoretical and empirical literature pertaining to securities laws and their enforcement by regulators and courts to establish what is known and what is yet unclear. Recent empirical research in the field has established that law matters. Mandatory disclosure...

The author surveys the literature on equity portfolio investment to develop a research agenda that could help developing countries interested in attracting equity portfolio flows. He finds that a broad literature exists on equity portfolio flows, but that most empirical tests have focused on...

The author examines the extent to which micro-credit reduces poverty and vulnerability through a case study of BRAC, one of the largest providers of micro-credit to the poor in Bangladesh. Household consumption data collected from 1,072 households is used to show that the largest effect on...