Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

This paper studies the nature of spillover effects in bank lending flows from advanced to the emerging market economies and identifies specific channels through which such effects occur. We examine a panel data set of cross-border bank flows from 17 advanced to 28 emerging market economies in...

This paper is the third installment in a series (the first and second editions were in 2001 and 2005) that traces a long-term growth failure in most of the world's countries.

The Argentine economy has grown 94 percent for the years 2002-2011, using International Monetary Fund projections for the end of this year. This is the fastest growth in the Western Hemisphere for this period, and among the highest growth rates in the world. It also compares favorably to...

This paper highlights the role of capital outflows in creating periods of turbulence by forcing emerging economies to raise massive funds abroad. First, we present stylised facts related to the capital outflows from the emerging economies. Then, we carry out a breakdown of the balance of...

This paper shows stylized facts on the rather large retrenchment of cross-border lending by Euro-area banks into emerging markets. The clearest case is Asia where Euro-area banks have massively lost market share. The reason, however, is not only related to their retrenching but also to the surge...

This study evaluates the impact of public external debt on long term economic growth of forty least developed countries (LDCs). Arellano-Bond SGMM method is used on unbalanced panel data spanning from 1975 to 2010. A comparative analysis based on different debt specifications and samples is...

Having reached a peak in 2002, Croatia's GDP growth lost momentum thereafter due to restrictive economic policy measures prompted by rising external and internal imbalances. The current account deficits, averaging 6-7% of the country's GDP over the past few years, were primarily the consequence...

The report gives an overview of the overall trends in output and employment in Croatia, and of the country's fiscal and external sectors. It concentrates in more detail on the manufacturing sector and its competitiveness in comparison with developments in other Central, East and Southeast...

This paper examines some of the economic issues that could be relevant to Mexico’s July 1st presidential election. These include the short-term impact of the 2008-2009 recession and recovery; the longer-term record of Mexico’s economy since the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) party took power...