This paper summarizes the methods and types of indicators that are often employed, both insid and outside the IMF, to assess whether exchange rates are broadly in line with economic fundamentals.

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the sources of recent growth in Tajikistan. It concludes that economic growth has been mainly driven by the services sector and a surge in remittances that have been mainly used for private consumption and small-scale private investment. The paper summarizes...

In recent years, the IMF has released a growing number of reports and other documents covering economic and financial developments and trends in member countries. Each report, prepared by a staff team after discussions with government officials, is published at the option of the member country.

This paper employs newly constructed measures for productivity differentials, external imbalances, and commodity terms of trade to estimate a panel cointegrating relationship between real exchange rates and a set of fundamentals for a sample of 48 industrial countries and emerging markets. It...

This paper examines the emergence of financial stability as a key policy objective. It discusses the underlying trends in the financial system, as well as the role of finance in relation to money, the real economy, and public policy. Financial stability is defined in terms of its ability to help...

This paper presents some conventional and new measures of market, credit, and liquidity risks for government bonds. These measures are analyzed from the perspective of a sovereign's debt manager. In particular, it examines duration, convexity, M-square, skewness, kurtosis, and VaR statistics as...

This paper examines opposing views on the euro's challenge to the dollar as an international currency. One view emphasizes Europe's large economy and diversification effects as undergirding a vigorous challenge. The other emphasizes "network externalities," particularly undergirding continued...

The paper describes six different methodologies that have been used to assess the equilibrium values of exchange rates and discusses their limitations. It applies several of the approaches to data for the United States as of 2006, illustrates that different approaches sometimes provide...

Despite intense calls for safeguarding public investment in Europe, public investment expenditure, when measured in relation to GDP, has steadily fallen in the last three decades, evoking fears that economic activity may be correspondingly negatively affected. At the same time, however, public...

This paper investigates the contagion from Russia to Brazil in late 1998 under two dimensions— players involved and the timing of events. The data does not seem to reflect a compensatory liquidation of assets story by international institutional investors. It does contribute, however, to the...