The Russian economy has improved after the recession, but recovery is fragile. Executive Directors appreciated the pre-crisis policy of taxing and saving oil revenues in a stabilization fund, which had created significant space for fiscal expansion, monetary easing, and extraordinary liquidity...

The paper discusses the stability of Brazil's financial system, which is diversified and shows sustained economic progress. Fiscal and monetary policies have been aimed to improve bank reserves, and foreign exchange intervention has been streamlined to curb volatility in the exchange market....

This paper reviews Poland’s economic performance under the Flexible Credit Line Arrangement. Economic growth in Poland is expected to slow in 2012, given the deteriorating outlook for the euro area. Risks are on the downside, mainly reflecting the possibility of spillovers from escalating...

The Netherlands has been heavily affected by the global financial crisis. The “Twin Peaks†supervision model, with Netherlands Central Bank - De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) as the prudential supervisor, and the Authority for Financial Markets (AFM) responsible for conduct-of-business...

This Selected Issues paper analyses the impact of a potential rebalancing of Icelandic residents’ investment portfolios as capital controls are lifted. It applies optimal portfolio theory to calculate the potential rebalancing toward foreign assets, and then makes an estimate of the...

Indonesia entered the current global crisis with strong initial conditions. This 2009 Article IV Consultation highlights that notwithstanding the initial impact of the global crisis, the economy has rebounded in 2009. Macroeconomic policy responses have kept appropriate pace with the evolving...

Romania’s GDP growth averaged more than 6½ percent per year from 2003 to 2008, as foreign direct investment and capital inflows helped finance high consumption and investment growth. The staff report for Romania’s request for a Stand-By Arrangement is also elaborated. Robust...

The authors report the results of an experiment designed to measure the impact of different forms of subsidies on the demand for postsecondary education financing among a sample of adults ages 18–55 in Canada. The experiment presents subjects with a series of choices involving trade-offs...

This article examines whether the overall market risk, along with risks reflecting uncertainty related to the long–run dynamics of market cash flows (dividends) and discount rates (returns), price average returns on single–sorted portfolios in the Greek stock market. Our results...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents’ performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive...