This 2009 Article IV Consultation highlights that like other open economies, Korea was hard hit by the global financial crisis during the last quarter of 2008. The authorities responded with a timely and comprehensive set of financial market and macrostabilization measures. Executive Directors...

The Republic of Korea’s 2008 Article IV Consultation highlights that Korea’s business cycle is turning downward while inflation pressures have increased. Risks are mainly external and on the downside, but a volatile domestic political environment also clouds the outlook. Inflation...

Kuwait’s economy continued to perform strongly in 2008, although signs of weakness emerged in the second half of the year. The authorities’ key challenge in the near term is to preserve financial stability and cushion the impact of the global slowdown. Executive Directors have...

This technical note examines the safety net, bank resolution, and crisis management framework in Spain. The financial safety net architecture for the banking sector comprises the Banco de España (BdE), the Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos (FGD), and the Fondo de Reestructuración Ordenada...

This Selected Issues paper on Euro Area Policies reviews the integration of Europe’s financial markets and the challenges faced by the new European Union member states with respect to euro adoption. Markets in the Financial Instruments Directive are expected to become applicable in...

Korea has enjoyed strong growth owing to rapidly increasing exports and consumption. Potential growth is slowing as the population ages, whereas social polarization is growing. Korea should implement plans to build an advanced financial system and improve service productivity by opening the...

This 2009 Article IV Consultation highlights that the U.S. economy has experienced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In the second half of 2008, financial pressures intensified and came to a head with the failure of Lehman Brothers in September. Executive Directors have...

If official figures overstated the growth of banking output in the UK in the recent boom, does this mean that GDP growth was overstated too? The answer is no. It is truer to say that if banking output was overstated then the output of some other industry or industries must have been understated,...

This article examines union responses to the reorganization of call centre work in Germany, drawing on case studies from the telecommunications, financial services and subcontractor industries. Service unions initially adopted innovative strategies to organize these workplaces, in response to...

To date, an operational measure of systemic risk capturing non-linear tail comovement between system-wide and individual bank returns has not yet been developed. This paper proposes an extension of the so-called CoVaR measure that captures the asymmetric response of the banking system to...