Hong Kong SAR was hit hard by the global financial crisis, which started out in the U.S. and spilled over to the rest of the world. Three years later, vulnerabilities in the euro area''s financial system and concerns over a hard landing in Mainland China have started to weigh on Hong Kong''s...

Assessing country risk is a core component of surveillance at the IMF. It is conducted through a comprehensive architecture, covering both bilateral and multilateral dimensions. This note describes some of the approaches used internally by Fund staff to examine a wide array of systemic risks...

Interest rates in China are composed of a mix of both market-determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (retail lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. This paper investigates the main drivers...

Chinese inflation, particularly non-food inflation, has been surprisingly modest in recent years. We find that supply factors, including those captured through upstream foreign commodity and producer prices, have been important drivers of non-food inflation, as has foreign demand for Chinese...

China's financial prices are informative enough for the PBC to introduce a monetary policy framework centered around interest rates. While bond yields are not fully efficient - reflecting regulation, liquidity, and segmentation - we find they contain considerable information about the state of...

Interest rates in China comprise a mix of both market determined interest rates (interbank rates and bond yields), and regulated interest rates (lending and deposit rates), reflecting China's gradual process of interest rate liberalization. We argue, using a theoretical model and empirical...

What might interest rate liberalization do to intermediation and the cost of capital in China? China's most binding interest rate control is a ceiling on the deposit rate, although lending rates are also regulated. Through case studies and model-based simulations, we find that liberalization...

Hong Kong SAR's government faces the dual challenges of volatile revenue and medium term spending pressures arising from a rapidly aging population. Age-related spending pressures raise long-run sustainability concerns, while revenue volatility creates risks to service provision, possibly...

This paper develops a new macrofinance model for small open economies, allowing the investigation of Mauritius`s experience with 'inflation targeting lite' as described in Stone (2003). It finds that this monetary policy regime has been associated with a general reduction in inflation,...

Governments often intervene in labor markets with the aim of reducing inequality and promoting employment. Such intervention often results in wage compression and restrictions on how firms use their workers. This paper investigates the impact of such interventions on the labor market conditions...