This paper presents a non-technical survey of the modern literature on international government debt. In doing so, it aims to match predictions made by theoretical models with the existing empirical evidence and to identify the models that best explain the real world experience of sovereign debt...

For a large number of developing countries, agriculture remains the single most important sector. Climate change has the potential to damage irreversibly the natural resource base on which agriculture depends, with grave consequences for food security. However, agriculture is the sector that has...

There are three reasons for attempting to reach a common understanding of the responsibilities of sovereign borrowers and their lenders. First, the flow of capital to sovereign debtors is exceptionally important to the world economy. Industrialized countries rely on it to finance their budget...

This paper examines the possible price impact of speculative bubbles and index-based investment activity on commodity futures prices over 2006–2008. I look specifically at crude oil, three non-ferrous metals (aluminium, copper and nickel) and three agricultural commodities (wheat, corn and...

Medium-terms shifts in the structure of world demand affect the sectoral composition of domestic output, trade and employment. A sustained reduction of global current-account imbalances implies a decline in the share of household consumption in aggregate demand in the United States and the...

The debate on whether price movements in commodity markets are determined by changes in physical supply and demand fundamentals or by the speculative effects of financial investors seems to find some element of agreement on one particular point: the need for increased transparency and improved...

The global crisis has disrupted the favourable external environment that made export-led development strategies viable. Developing countries can compensate for the resulting decline in aggregate demand growth through domestic demand if their domestic markets are sufficiently large and if they...

The paper discusses the income inequality changes which have taken place in a few representative developing regions during the last 30 years. While inequality rose in the majority of the countries of these regions in the 1980s and 1990s, the last decade was characterized by a bifurcation of...

This paper analyses the co-movements between the United States stock market and several commodity futures between 1997 and 2011, by computing dynamic conditional correlations at: (i) 1-hour; (ii) 5-minute; (iii) 10-second; and (iv) 1-second frequencies. We document a synchronized structural break,...

We study the potential for introducing indexation on loans provided by multilateral lenders to low income countries (LICs), and thus whether a reform of their lending policy is feasible and economically justified. To this end, we provide new evidence for a group of 40 international development...