Deteriorating public finances around the world raise doubts about countries'abilities to bail out their largest banks. For an international sample of banks, this paper investigates the impact of government indebtedness and deficits on bank stock prices and credit default swap spreads. Overall,...

This paper studies the extent of bank competition in the Middle East and Northern Africa region during 1994-2008, using non-structural measures of competition such as the H-statistic and the Lerner index. Both these measures suggest that banking sector competition in the region is lower relative...

The magnitude of the public liabilities incurred as a result of the unprecedented government action in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and the consequences of exiting from the projected high debt scenario, have become a major source of concern about a future sovereign debt crisis....

The authors analyze the Washington Consensus, which at its original formulation reflected views not only from Washington, but also from Latin America. Tracing the life of the Consensus from a Latin American perspective in terms of evolving economic development paradigms, they document the...

This paper reports the findings of a study that examined the relationship between information management practices of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) and their access to bank finance. Data were collected with a researcher-administered questionnaire and analysed using non-parametric...

Tajikistan's economy has recovered strongly after the collapse of the 1990s, but sustaining rapid economic growth over the long term and reducing poverty present major challenges for policymakers. This paper contributes to the debate over the strategic role for fiscal policy to play in meeting...

Can perceptions data help us understand investment climate constraints facing the private sector? Or do firms simply complain about everything? In this paper, the authors provide a picture of how firms'views on constraints differ across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the World Bank's...

This paper estimates a dynamic business growth equation on a sample of small-scale manufacturers. The results suggest that excessive labor regulation, power shortages, and problems of access to finance are significant influences on industrial growth in India. The expected annual sales growth...

Until the late 1960s, the World Bank presented itself as an institution devoted to making sound and directly productive project loans. Yet, during its very early years, some discussions developed inside the Bank regarding the possibility of issuing different types of loans, namely (i) loans...

Studies of risk and its consequences tend to focus on one risk factor, such as a drought or an economic crisis. Yet 2003 household surveys in rural Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash-crop-growing regions in Tanzania that experienced a precipitous coffee price decline around the turn of the...