Mounting external debt and large-scale capital flight have been at the forefront of Africa's economic problems since the 1980s. External Debt and Capital Flight in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by S. Ibi Ajayi and Mohsin S. Khan, takes a penetrating look at debt and capital flight during the 1990s...

This paper examines the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to answer the question of whether the region is at a turning point in its economic fortunes. The improvement in growth reflects in part a rise in the utilization of existing capacity. To be sustained, however, a high rate of growth...

In recent years there has been substantial theoretical and empirical work on the role that financial markets play in fostering economic growth and development. This paper provides a selective review of the literature, as well as new empirical evidence on the relationship between financial...

The paper uses finance and agency theory to establish two main propositions: First, that the conditionality attached to adjustment programs supported by the IMF is justified. Second, that ownership of programs by the borrowing country is crucial for their success. Hence, since both IMF...

There is now a substantial theoretical literature arguing that inflation impedes financial deepening. Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that the relationship is a nonlinear one, in that there is a threshold level of inflation below which inflation has a positive effect on financial depth,...

Movements in global capital during the late 1990s and the greater emphasis on price stability led many countries to abandon fixed exchange rate regimes and to design institutions and monetary policies to achieve credibility in the goal of lowering inflation. Such recent developments have brought...

This volume presents the proceedings of a symposium that was orgainzed jointly by the IMF and the World Bank and held in Washington, D.C. The symposium was organized by Vittorio Corbo, Morris Goldstein, and Mohsin Khan. The papers review the design of, and the economic rationale behind,...

The conventional growth-accounting approach to estimating the sources of economic growth requires unrealistically strong assumptions about the competitiveness of factor markets and the form of the underlying aggregate production function. This paper outlines a new approach utilizing...

Since 1978 the Chinese economy has grown on average more than 9 percent a year. Per capita income has nearly quadrupled in the past 15 years and some analysts predict that within 20 years the Chinese economy will be larger than that of the United States. This pamphlet analyzes the reasons for...

This paper examines the relative demands for domestic and foreign currency deposits by residents of developing countries. A dynamic currency substitution model that incorporates forward-looking rational expectations is formulated and then estimated for a group of ten developing countries. The...