Savings are an import prerequisite of investment and long term growth in a country and the ability of a country to enter a 'beneficial debt cycle'. The paper analyzes how savings respond to the institutional quality in developing and transition economies. For a panel of about 60 countries over a...

The principal agent problem is one of the major issues of the credit rating agency market. Is it possible to solve the prevailing incentive problem of the market and contemporaneously satisfy the reputation demand of the investors? This paper presents an option for regulating the credit rating...

Some developing countries borrow abroad and experience good growth (above 2 %), which we call good growth, while others borrow and have poor growth (below 1 %), which we label as bad growth. The data comprise all 443 available observations of borrowing for one 5-year period and average growth...

Monetary policy rules have been considered as fundamental protection against inflation. However, empirical evidence for a correlation between rules and inflation is relatively weak. In this paper, we first discuss likely causes for this weak link and present the argument that monetary commitment...

This article deals with the macro-economics of the Trans-European Automated Re- al-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System (TARGET2). Originally, the TARGET2 was in-tended to solely function as a monetary arrangement for liquidity issues. It is shown that the TARGET2 contributes to a...

Since the introduction of the HIPC Initiative in the early 2000s, indebted LICs had to show a decent governance performance before their debts were forgiven. We discuss the hypothesis that during the follow-up, Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), the World Bank has refrained from this...

The paper analyses the effects of the monetary policy crisis management of the European Central Bank on the economic order of Germany. It is argued that in post-war Europe the German social market economy as designed by Eucken (1952) and Müller-Armack (1966) has been a core element of growth,...

While mature capital markets in Western economies suffer from a significant drop in listed companies for two decades, the number of listings at stock exchanges on the African continent is increasing and the importance of stock exchanges for equity issues is growing. This not only raises...

The evidence demonstrating that nations gain from trade is overwhelming. However, trade liberalization can cause disruption to firms and workers, and its gains and losses are spread unevenly. While many gain from trade, import surges have sometimes undermined the economic viability of whole...