Instant, or fast, payments are credit transfers completed and settled within seconds or minutes. They have low costs, reduce payment risk, and have significantly replaced the use of cash, cards, or check and direct debit payments. We note the role played by regulators in promoting instant...

Financial technology (Fintech) has prompted authorities to consider their potential financial stability benefits, risks, and effective regulation. Recent developments suggest that regulatory approaches and their legal foundations need to augment entity-based regulation with increasing focus on...

This paper analyzes the monetary policy framework in Kazakhstan. The authorities have been successful in containing inflation in the context of a managed exchange rate regime. Over the past two years, the central bank has taken steps to enhance its ability to regulate liquidity in the financial...

The COVID-19 pandemic led many emerging market central banks to adopt, for the first time, unconventional policies in the form of asset purchase programs. In this study, we analyze the effects of these announcements on domestic financial markets using both event studies and local projections...

We analyze the causes of the apparent bias towards optimism in growth forecasts underpinning the design of IMF-supported programs, which has been documented in the literature. We find that financial variables observable to forecasters are strong predictors of growth forecast errors. The greater...

This paper explores the nexus between the financial cycle and business cycle in Brazil. Cycles are estimated using a variety of commonly-used statistical methods and with a small, semistructural model of the Brazilian economy. An advantage of using the model-based approach is that financial and...

Finance and growth emerged as a distinct field of economics during the last three decades as economists integrated the fields of finance and economic growth and then explored the ramifications of the functioning of financial systems on economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. In this...

The paper evaluates the key drivers of fiscal crises in a sample of countries from all three income groups—advanced, emerging, and low-income countries, using fiscal crisis data recently developed by the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department. The empirical study focuses on three questions: (1) How...

The global economy is in the midst of an unprecedented slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This systemic risk like no other at a time of record-breaking debt levels, especially among nonfinancial firms across the world, could exacerbate corporate vulnerabilities, deepen macro-financial...