Most of the chapters in this volume were prepared for a conference in honor of Guillermo Calvo, organized by the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department and held at Fund headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 15–16,2004. At the editors’ request, a couple of chapters were...

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...

Over the last 20 years, some financial events, such as devaluations or defaults, have triggered an immediate adverse chain reaction in other countries -- which we call fast and furious contagion. Yet, on other occasions, similar events have failed to trigger any immediate international reaction....

The economics profession has an unfortunate tendency to view recent experience in the narrow window provided by standard datasets. With a few notable exceptions, cross-country empirical studies on financial crises typically begin in 1980 and are limited in other important respects. Yet an event...

The "engine of growth" argument holds that an economic expansion in a large country increases the growth of its trading partners. Growth in developing countries is routinely linked to growth patterns in the Industrial economies. This paper examines the role of commodity markets in transmitting...

Since the Tequila crisis of 1994-95, the Asian flu of 1997, and the Russian virus of 1998, economists have been busy producing research on the subject of contagion. Yet, few studies have examined empirically through which channels the disturbances are transmitted if there are, indeed,...