Many emerging market countries have suffered financial crises. One view blames soft pegs for these crises. Adherents to that view suggest that countries move to corner solutions--hard pegs or floating exchange rates. We analyze the behavior of exchange rates, reserves, and interest rates to...

Global financial markets are showing strains on a scale and scope not witnessed in the past three-quarters of a century. What started with elevated losses on U.S.-subprime mortgages has spread beyond the borders of the United States and the confines of the mortgage market. Many risk spreads have...

Lucas (1990) argued that it was a paradox that more capital does not flow from rich countries to poor countries. He rejected the standard explanation of expropriation risk and argued that paucity of capital flows to poor countries must instead be rooted in externalities in human capital...

Since 1990 capital has flowed from industrial countries to developing regions like Latin America, and parts of Asia. Reentry into international capital markets is a welcome turn of events for most countries. However, capital inflows are often associated with inflationary pressures, a real...

The characteristics of recent capital inflows to Latin America are discussed. It is argued that these inflows are partially explained by economic conditions outside the region, like the recession in the United States and lower international interest rates. The importance of external factors...

During the early 1990s much has been written about the return of foreign private capital to many of the larger Asian and Latin American countries. However, until 1992 there was little evidence that countries in sub-Saharan Africa were participating in this phenomenon. In this paper we use...

The "traditional structural approach" to determining real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the sustained weakness in commodity prices in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper...

Some of the questions that emerge from the African experiences were echoing those of capital-importing countries in other regions: To what extent are the capital inflows driven by external fundamentals? Or conversely, what role have domestic macroeconomic policies and structural reforms played...

Global financial markets are showing strains on a scale and scope not witnessed in the past three-quarters of a century. What started with elevated losses on U.S.-subprime mortgages has spread beyond the borders of the United States and the confines of the mortgage market. Many risk spreads have...

This paper represents a neoclassical model that explains the observed empirical relationship between government spending and world commodity supplies and the real exchange rate and real commodity prices. It is shown that fiscal expansion and increasing world commodity supplies simultaneously...