Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- Executive Summary -- Overview -- Part I. Monitoring global development progress -- Development progress over the MDG period has been impressive -- Despite solid development gains, significant work remains -- Amid...

Large inflows from the European Union to the New Member States are likely to significantlyimpact macroeconomic outcomes. In this paper, we use the IMF's Global Integrated Monetaryand Fiscal model (GIMF) to analyze the impact of the transfers and show the conditionsunder which they would help...

This paper documents and analyzes crisis-related changes in government debt issuance practices in the 16 euro zone countries and Denmark. Using a newly constructed database on primary market debt issuance during 2007-09, we find evidence of a shift away from pre-crisis standards of best funding...

Monetary policy, at least in part, operates through both an interest rate and credit channel. The question arises, therefore, whether monetary policy is a less potent a device in affecting output and inflation in countries that have low levels of credit and where investment and consumption are...

This study characterizes volatility dynamics in external emerging bond markets and examines how prices and volatility respond to news about macroeconomic fundamentals. As in mature bond markets, macroeconomic surprises in external emerging bond markets are found to a¤ect both conditional...

In most macroeconomic models, the substitutability between domestic and foreign goods is calibrated using aggregated data. This imposes homogeneous elasticities across goods, and the calibration is only valid under this assumption. If elasticities are heterogeneous, the aggregate...

Did the occurrence of systemic banking crises in the 1990s and 2000s significantly alter the behavior of banks in the Mercosur? The objective of this paper is to answer this question by analyzing changes in bank behavior after crises in the Mercosur region. To our knowledge, this is the first...

This paper provides a historical perspective on the role of international reserves in low-income countries as a cushion against large external shocks over the last three decades - including the current global crisis. The results suggest that international reserves have played a role in buffering...

Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their...

This study examines the relationship between the foreign exchange regime and macroeconomic performance in Eastern Africa. The study focuses on seven countries, five of which decisively liberalized their foreign exchange regimes. The study assesses the relationship between (i) growth and various...