More than eight years after the introduction of the euro, impacts on developing countries have been relatively modest. Overall, the euro has become much more important in debt issuance than in official foreign exchange reserve holdings. The former has benefited from the creation of a large set...

The current financial crisis has highlighted the danger that declines in confidence can have a self-fulfilling effect on economic activity. In this paper, the authors consider ways of measuring investor and consumer confidence, and try to explain the evolution of confidence using measures of...

Backed by rapid economic growth, growing financial clout, and a newfound sense of assertiveness in recent years, the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - are a driving force behind an incipient transformation of the world economy away from a US-dominated system toward a multipolar...

"The authors offer evidence that U.S. interest rate policy has an important influence in the determination of credit spreads on emerging market bonds over U.S. benchmark treasuries and therefore on their cost of capital. Their analysis improves on the existing literature and understanding by...

La culture du coton a connu un énorme succès en Afrique de l'Ouest et du Centre. La région est actuellement deuxième exportateur mondial derrière les Etats Unis, avec une part de marché de 15 pourcent. Malgré la forte performance qu'elle a connu dans le passé, la filière est...

One justification for the use by central banks of exchange market intervention is that goods prices adjust more slowly than asset prices. As a result, monetary shocks can produce exchange rate appreciations or depreciations that lead real currency values to diverge from their long-run...

In many industrial countries persistent and large government deficits, which raise government debt as a ratio of gross national product (GNP) and of total private wealth, are causing considerable concern because of their possible unfavorable effects on the stock of productive capital. It is now...