A decade-long diversification of official reserves into riskier investments came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the global financial crisis, when many central bank reserve managers started to withdraw their deposits from the banking sector in an apparent flight to quality and safety. We...

Top down spillovers of sovereign default risk can have serious consequences for the private sector in emerging markets. This paper analyzes the effects of these spillovers using firm-level data from 31 emerging market economies. We assess how sovereign risk affects corporate access to...

In this paper, we examine the relevance of the twin deficits hypothesis (TDH) for selected East Asian countries. Empirical results reveal that the admission of regime shifts substantially influences the conclusion that TDH exists in four out of the seven countries that we have investigated. It...

This paper aims at studying the sustainability of current accounts in Sub-Saharan Africa and determining whether this sustainability depends on the exchange rate regime. Relying on a formal theoretical framework and recent panel cointegration techniques, our findings show that current accounts...

In analysing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

We analyse global and euro area imbalances by focusing on China and Germany as large surplus and creditor countries. In the 2000s, domestic reforms in both countries expanded the effective labour force, restrained wages, shifted income towards profits and increased corporate saving. As a result,...

It is often argued that the United States cannot continue for long to run current account deficits of their current size of 5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This article questions this conventional wisdom by examining the implications were the United States to continue to run current...

In this paper, we provide a test of the sustainability of external imbalances in the OECD countries over the years 1970-2007, i.e., before the beginning of the international financial crisis. Specifically, we deal with the case of those countries that have experienced current account deficits in...

This paper studies the impact of the main external shocks which the eurozone and member states have undergone since the start of the 2000s. Such shocks have been monetary (drop in global interest rates), financial (two stock market crises) and real (rising oil prices and an accumulation of...

In this article we re-examine the mean-reverting property of the current account for the US, the UK, Canada and France. This is important because a current account that is not a stationary process implies that the external debts are unsustainable. The empirical results show that the current...