The Ds: Sharp economic downturns follow banking crises; with government revenues falling, fiscal deficits worsen; deficits lead to debt; as debts pile up rating downgrades follow. For the most fortunate countries it does not end in default

Sovereign credit ratings play an important part in determining countries' access to international capital markets and the terms of that access. In principle, there is no reason to expect that sovereign credit ratings should systematically predict currency crises. In practice, in emerging market...

Financial crises of every variety rocked emerging markets in the second half of the 1990s. Nearly every region experienced currency crashes, banking crises were both numerous and severe, and a few countries, facing extreme duress, defaulted on their sovereign debt. Not surprisingly, then, there...

The Ds:Sharp economic downturns follow banking crises; with government revenues falling, fiscal deficits worsen; deficits lead to debt; as debts pile up rating downgrades follow.For the most fortunate countries it does not end in default.

This paper shows that China has launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress. It builds the first comprehensive dataset on China's overseas bailouts between 2000 and 2021 and provide new insights into China's growing role in the global financial...

This study analyzes mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic for eight large Latin American cities. Indicators of mobility by socioeconomic status (SES) are generated by combining georeferenced mobile phone information with granular census data. Before the pandemic, a strong positive...

This paper analyzes extractive industries in Colombia and their connections to other economic activities in the country. We use detailed social security data on all formal employees to create an industry-relatedness measure using labor flows between industries. Drawing on the vast network...

The current coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented public health challenge that has devastating economic impacts for households. Using a sample of 230,540 respondents to online surveys in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we show that the economic impacts are large and unequal:...

The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the...