Over the past decade the United States has experienced widening current account deficits and a steady deterioration of its net foreign asset position. During the second half of the 1990s, this deterioration was fueled by foreign investment in a booming U.S. stock market. During the first half of...

The authors combine the literature on financial crises in emerging markets and developing economies with that on international migrations by investigating whether the increasingly large flows of workers' remittances can help reduce the probability of current account reversals. The rationale for...

China in the past few years has emerged as a net foreign creditor on the international scene with net foreign assets slightly greater than zero percent of wealth. This is surprising given that China is a relatively poor country with a capital-labor ratio about one-fifth the world average and...

The 2008-2009 financial crisis has shaken the prevailing equilibrium of the global economy, with a collapse in capital flows and international trade. How will the post-crisis constellation of current account imbalances look? Will the world resume financing the United States (US), and continue...

The fluctuating economies and differing experiences of countries before and after the economic crisis of 2008 indicate a complex network of possible influences. Persistent current account deficits and exchange rate misalignments frequently presage disruptive economic trends. The result can be...

This paper surveys the academic and policy debate on the origins of global imbalances, their prospects after the global crisis, and their policy implications. A conventional view of global imbalances considers them to primarily result from macroeconomic policies and cyclical forces that cause...

Development accounting shows that a significant part of cross-country income differences is attributed to differences in total factor productivity (TFP), but the sources of TFP differences are not well understood. This paper considers the role of international trade to explain cross-country...

Central to the global impacts of China's emergence has been its structural imbalance (its excess product supply and excess saving), but this has diminished considerably in the transition years since 2010. These imbalances are now reversed as its consumption expands faster than its GDP and so the...

How does financial integration impact capital accumulation, current-account dynamics, and cross-country inequality? We investigate this question within a two-country, general-equilibrium, incomplete-markets model that focuses on the importance of idiosyncratic entrepreneurial risk - a risk that...