This paper considers policies of the industrialized countries, as they pertain to crises in emerging markets. These fall into three areas: (1) their own macroeconomic policies, which determine the global financial environment; (2) their role in responding to crises when they occur, particularly...

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle is not confined to individual anecdotes or case studies, but has been borne out in...

A new technique for estimating countries' de facto exchange rate regimes synthesizes two approaches. One approach estimates the implicit de facto basket weights in an OLS regression of the local currency value rate against major currency values. Here the hypothesis is a basket peg with little...

The paper offers a new approach to estimate de facto exchange rate regimes, a synthesis of two techniques. One is a technique that the authors have used in the past to estimate implicit de facto weights when the hypothesis is a basket peg with little flexibility. The second is a technique used...

Andy Rose (2000), followed by many others, has used the gravity model of bilateral trade on a large data set to estimate the trade effects of monetary unions among small countries. The finding has been large estimates: Trade among members seems to double or triple, that is, to increase by...

The paper updates the answer to the question: what precisely is the exchange rate regime that China has put into place since 2005, when it announced a move away from the dollar peg? Is it a basket anchor with the possibility of cumulatable daily appreciations, as was announced at the time? We...

I approach the state of global currency issues by identifying eight concepts that I see as having recently "peaked" and eight more that I see as currently rising in relevance. Those that I see as having already seen their best days are: the G-7, global savings glut, corners hypothesis,...

Many studies have replicated the finding that the forward rate is a biased predictor of the future change in the spot exchange rate. Usually the forward discount actually points in the wrong direction. But, at least until recently, those studies applied only to advanced economies and major...

Prices of most agricultural and mineral commodities rose strongly in the past decade, peaking sharply in 2008. Popular explanations included strong global growth (especially from China and India), easy monetary policy (as reflected in low real interest rates or expected inflation), a speculative...