This paper presents a critical approach to the policy debate about external debt sustainability and debt relief in the High Indebted Poor countries (HIPC). The authors look at the different approaches to and models of debt sustainability and claim that a realistic evaluation of this issue...

This paper presents an update of the Grilli-Masciandaro-Tabellini (GMT) index of central bank (CB) autonomy, based on CB legislation as of end-2003. The index is applied to a set of OECD and developing countries, and emerging market economies. For a smaller set of countries, the paper presents a...

This paper presents a survey of the literature on the measurement of central bank autonomy. We distinguish inputs that constitute the building blocks in the literature, and the literature that builds on them. Issues including sensitivity analysis, robustness, and endogeneity are discussed. The...

We calculate indexes of central bank autonomy (CBA) for 163 central banks as of end-2003, and comparable indexes for a subgroup of 68 central banks as of the end of the 1980s. The results confirm strong improvements in both economic and political CBA over the past couple of decades, although...

This paper examines the relationship between the quality of banking supervision and governance of the supervisory agency, based on assessments of the Basel Core Principles and the IMF Code on Transparency in Financial Policies, covering 116 and 53 countries, respectively, with 51 common to both....

In many countries, authorities have designated a group of financial firms as the principal intermediaries in the government securities market-referred to as ""primary dealers"" or a ""primary dealer system."" This paper discusses policy issues related to the establishment of a primary dealer...

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the architecture of supervisory powers, including the role of the central bank and the degree of integration of banking supervision with the supervision of securities and insurance companies. We focus on results on Basel Core Principles (BCP)...

This paper examines the relationship between the quality of banking supervision and governance of the supervisory agency. The analysis is based on indices constructed from the assessment of the Basel Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision that measure the quality of banking...