A new aggregation scheme used to measure the sources of fiscal financing of indebted countries suggests that there was a fundamental improvement in the seniority of domestic debt at the expense of foreign bank debt during the late 1980s. We argue that this was the revenue maximizing response of...

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and...

This paper presents a framework for evaluating the relative contributions of different creditors in cases where only partial payments can be made by the debtor country. A methodology is developed to calculate partial payments—or alternatively put—determine residual financing. By focusing on...

This paper puts together a set of stylized facts of the corporate sector dynamics of systemic financial crises based on recent crisis episodes with a view to identifying the key issues and their policy implications. The evidence suggests that corporate crisis dynamics arc triggered by a cutoff...

Inflation targeting lite (ITL) countries float their exchange rate and announce an inflation target, but are not able to maintain the inflation target as the foremost policy objective. This paper identifies 19 emerging market countries as practitioners of ITL. They seem to focus mainly on...

Money demand often surges after successful macroeconomic stabilization. This paper gives a name—financial infusion—to these surges because their size, unpredictability, and concurrence with other “success shocks” pose unique challenges to policy, especially under a money rule. An...

Modifications to Japan''s monetary policy framework will be needed as positive inflation resumes because the current monetary regime and operations are tailored to ending deflation. The paper suggests that the monetary regime should move from an ""anti-deflation"" objective to an inflation...

The provision of foreign exchange liquidity by emerging market central banks during the global shock of 2008-09 departs from the domestic liquidity lender of last resort role described by Bagehot in his classic ""Lombard Street."" This paper documents and analyzes the foreign exchange liquidity...

Unconventional central bank measures are playing a key policy role for many advanced economies in the 2007-09 global crisis. Are they playing a similar role for emerging economies? Emerging economies have widely used unconventional foreign exchange and domestic short-term liquidity easing...

The experience of full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) countries is used here to shed light on the costs and benefits of greater monetary policy transparency for the G3. For the United States and the euro area, a hypothetical adoption of FFIT would incur a cost of less discretion while...