Why are investors rushing to purchase US government securities when the US is the epicentre of the financial crisis? This column attributes the paradox to key emerging market economies’ exchange practices, which require reserves most often invested in US government securities. America’s...

Primary commodities still account for the bulk of exports in many developing countries. However, real commodity prices have been declining almost continuously since the early 1980s. The appropriate policy response to a terms of trade shock depends importantly on whether the shock is perceived to...

Half a decade has passed since the resurgence of international capital flows to many developing countries. The recent surge in capital inflows was initially attributed to domestic developments, such as the sound policies and stronger economic performance of a handful of countries. Eventually, it...

At the time of writing there were widespread concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. There is conclusive evidence that the pace of growth has slowed, which has prompted the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates on two occasions (a total of 100 basis points thus far). As usual, when faced...

This book is a selection of VoxEU.org columns that deal with the ongoing global financial crisis. VoxEU.org is a portal for research-based policy analysis and commentary written by leading economists. It was launched in June 2007 with the aim of enriching the economic policy debate by making it...

Economists have long been involved in the search for a few key indicators that predict the behavior of market economies. For Canada, it has been shown that the yield curve reliably tilts down and that real M1 growth declines before economic contraction, but this has been demonstrated almost...

This paper analyzes how the crisis in Asia spread during the second half of 1997. We cast our net wide and investigate several possible trade and financial linkages among the Asian economies. We construct a series of “contagion vulnerability indices,” which capture the various manifestations...

Speaking before the IDB Board of Directors, Carmen Reinhart discussed the syndrome of “debt intolerance,” whereby countries with weak institutional structures and problematic political systems borrow in order to avoid difficult fiscal decisions but subsequently find themselves unwilling or...

Raising real interest rates has been cited as a way to increase private saving, and thus provide the resources for growth. But this may not be a viable approach in the poorest developing countries in which most people live at subsistence level. In these situations, consumption is not very...

Using annual data for Colombia over the last thirty years and a new battery of econometric techniques, we test opposing theories that explain macroeconomic fluctuations: The neoclassical synthesis, which posits that, in the presence of temporary price rigidity, an unanticipated monetary...