This paper considers ongoing and proposed reforms of the international financial system in light of Latin America's recent experience. Most proposals are based on one of three diagnoses: excessive capital flows, insufficient capital flows, and excessively volatile capital flows. While theories...

This paper provides an overview and assessment of reform initiatives, both those currently on the table and those that are not but should be. The intent is to clarify the logic behind these proposals and assess them from a Latin American perspective. For each core initiative examined in this...

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to model the components of credit risk in primary debt markets and evaluate changes in these factors in times of crisis. Design/methodology/approach - The authors use a unique dataset consisting of nearly 163,000 new loans and bond issues in the USA and...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

This paper surveys the foreign exchange markets, money and secondary government security markets, and stock exchanges in 107 smaller economy countries. The underdevelopment of these markets impedes risk transfer, monetary policy, corporate financing, and the capacity to absorb capital inflows....

In just over a decade after independence, the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have transformed themselves into fully functioning, small open-market economies that will be joining the European Union. Capital Markets and Financial Intermediation in The Baltics analyzes the...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare gains from financial integration for developing and emerging market economies. To do so, we build a stochastic endogenous growth model for a small open economy that can (i) borrow from the rest of the world, (ii) invest in foreign assets, and...

The paper has three objectives. After a general introduction to some of the concepts and basic techniques of stress testing, the paper gives an overview of some of the conceptual issues involved in evaluating risks at the aggregated level of financial systems. Second, this study provides a basic...

This paper investigates the determinants of the international role of a currency. It argues that standard determinants such as monetary performance and financial openness are at best imperfect indicators of a currency’s stability prospects, because the issuer’s promise of stability is not...