Unlike many earlier financial crises, the current sub-prime-induced crisis originated in advanced economies (in the US housing sector) in the summer of 2007, and rapidly mushroomed into a global financial crisis by September 2008. Developing nations, especially the ‘least developed...

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 shook the foundations of the global economy. What began as a localised currency crisis soon engulfed the entire Asian region. What went wrong and how did the Asian economies, long considered 'miracles', respond? How did the United States, Japan and other G-7...

What began as a downturn in the US housing sector in the summer of 2007 had mushroomed into a global financial crisis by September 2008: the most severe since the 1930s. Developing countries, including China and India, at first seemingly sheltered from the worst of the turmoil, have not been...

What explains the sharp increase in the Chinese economy's indebtedness, in particular the China's onshore corporate debt? Has the overall debt burden reached a threshold where it poses a systemic risk, thereby making the economy vulnerable to a “Lehman Moment” - with disorderly unwinding of...

Since the 1991 balance of payments crisis, India has embarked on an ambitious program of economic liberalization. Over the past decade the Indian government has introduced a series of far-reaching reforms that have transformed the once closed economy. This paper examines the policy reforms and...

In Korea, the IMF-supported program, approved in late 1997, focused on financial sector restructuring, corporate governance, capital account liberalization, labor market reforms and trade liberalization. As in Thailand, it soon became clear that the IMF program underestimated the severity and...

One of the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations is to reduce the global level of “extreme poverty” (the roughly 1.5 billion people whose income is less than $1 a day) by half by 2015. How can such a goal be reached? This paper argues that since the vast majority of the...