The paper analyzes the factors that contribute to the re-access of countries that emerge from a severe financial crisis to the international capital markets. It conjectures that these factors depend on a sovereign''s commitment and ability to repay its foreign debt, signaled by sound...

The G-20 has called for a review of the scope of financial regulation. This call reflects concern that the coverage of prudential regulation has been too narrow. A discussion of extending the regulatory perimeter should, therefore, weigh carefully the experience of the past two years against...

This paper analyzes the behavior of current account deficits in Africa and estimates whether the deficits are excessive with respect to fundamentals. The findings are the deficits are (i) not very persistent; (ii) positively linked with domestic growth; (iii) strongly linked with public (and...

We study the link between the probability of default implied by Credit Default Swaps (CDS) spreads and the final prices of the defaulted bonds as established at the CDS settlement auctions. We observe that the post-default recovery rates at the observed spreads imply markets were often...