Across a sample of thirty four emerging countries, the evidence shows the frequent existence of a pro-cyclical fiscal impulse. However, the scope for countercyclical policy increases with the availability of international reserves as it enhances credibility and mitigates concerns about the...

Strong growth in investment made a key contribution to the economic recovery in Argentina earlier this decade. The paper uses firm-level data to assess changes in financing constraints and the linkages between real investment at the firm level and macroeconomic developments in the real exchange...

This paper surveys the foreign exchange markets, money and secondary government security markets, and stock exchanges in 107 smaller economy countries. The underdevelopment of these markets impedes risk transfer, monetary policy, corporate financing, and the capacity to absorb capital inflows....

Australia has enjoyed fifteen years of uninterrupted economic expansion since 1992 despite shocks such as the Asian crisis in 1997-98 and the information technology bust in 2000-01. This resilient economic performance owes much to wide-ranging structural reforms and the improved frameworks for...

Does the choice of exchange rate regime affect the way an economy's adjustment to real shocks? Exploiting the randomness of natural shocks, this paper assesses empirically the often contrasting answers found in the theoretical literature. The evidence supports key themes in this literature, and...

This paper reviews the evolution of China's real effective exchange rate between 1980 and 2002, and uses a structural vector autoregression model to study the relative importance of different types of macroeconomic shocks for fluctuations in the real exchange rate. The structural decomposition...

China’s transformation into a dynamic private-sector-led economy and its integration into the world economy have been among the most dramatic global economic developments of recent decades. This paper provides an overview of some of the key aspects of recent developments in China’s...

This paper addresses the issue of the appropriate exchange rate regimes for Jordan and Lebanon in the context of the literature on optimum currency areas and the arguments concerning the use of the exchange rate as a nominal anchor for the economy. It presents some empirical results on the...