The SDN will assess the youth unemployment problem in advanced European countries, with a special focus on the euro area. It will document the main trends in youth and adult unemployment in 22 European countries before and after the global financial crisis. It will identify the main drivers of...

In bilateral and multilateral surveillance, countries are often urged to consider alternative policies that would result in superior outcomes for the country itself and, perhaps serendipitously, for the world economy. While it is possible that policy makers in the country do not fully recognize...

This note overviews macroprudential policy options that have been proposed to address the systemic risks experienced during the recent financial crisis. It contributes to the policy debate by providing a taxonomy of macroprudential policies in terms of the specific negative externalities in the...

Imbalances within the euro area have been a defining feature of the crisis. This paper provides a critical analysis of the ongoing rebalancing of euro area “deficit economies†(Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) that accumulated large current account deficits and external liability...

This paper examines the various roles of IMF financing in crisis prevention. Emerging market economies that experienced financial crises in the past have been subject to enormous economic and social costs, highlighting the importance of crisis prevention. While the main defense against a crisis...

The aim of this paper is to assess the short- and medium-term impact of debt crises on GDP. Using an unbalanced panel of 154 countries from 1970 to 2008, the paper shows that debt crises produce significant and long-lasting output losses, reducing output by about 10 percent after eight years....

This paper adopts the bounds testing procedure developed by Pesaran et al. (2001) to test the stability of the long-run money demand for Ghana. The results provide strong evidence for the presence of a stable, well-identified long-run money demand during a period of substantial changes in the...

BRICs development financing flows have increased significantly and are expected to become more prominent in the post-crisis era. We investigate the potential implications on the country-allocation of loan commitments and the degree of concessionality using a panel vector autoregression model and...

Contrary to widespread expectation, debt renegotiations in the era of bond finance have generally been quick and involved little litigation. We present a model that rationalizes the initial fears and offers interpretations for why they did not materialize. When the exchange offer is sufficiently...

This paper investigates whether developing and emerging market countries can implement monetary policies similar to those used by advanced countries during the recent global crisis - injecting significant amounts of money into the financial system without facing major short-run adverse...