A major aim of Basel II has been to revise the rules of the 1988 Basel Capital Accord in such a way as to align banks´ regulatory capital more closely with their risks, taking account of progress in the measurement and management of risk and of the opportunities which these provide for...

The Basel Committee´s Proposals for Revised Capital Standards: Mark 2 and the State of Play. The new 500-page consultative document on capital standards of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), “The New Basel Capital Accord”, gives what is likely to prove a reasonable idea of...

Recent financial crises, whose effects have been particularly severe in developing countries, have led to a wide-ranging debate on international financial reform. This debate has had to confront the implications of the huge growth of international capital movements, one of whose consequences has...

This paper addresses the availability of statistical data for international trade in banking services. Such data are required for WTO negotiations and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Following a discussion of areas of work for which data on international trade in banking...

Trade in financial services is a major item on the agenda of the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations stalled since the ministerial meeting in Cancun in September. This paper reviews trends in such trade and major issues which have been raised in these negotiations so far. The WTO...

In the aftermath of the breakdown of the multilateral trade negotiations in Cancun in mid-September 2003, various ideas have been put forward not only for their re-launching but also more broadly for the reform of the WTO as an institution and as a repository for agreements on trade and related...

The paper discusses the issue of globalization from the perspective of employment and labour. It argues that it is the ideological basis of policy prescriptions advanced in support of globalization, rather than the increasing global interdependence, that is the real source of controversy and...

This paper analyses the quest for technological progress in China, a large, semi-industrialized, socialist developing country. In the introduction, it is argued that international income convergence is not an automatic product of market forces. Therefore, the path of technological progress in a...

The Exchange Rate: Economic Policy Tool or Market Price? The paper reconsiders the failure of mainstream economics to come up with a consistent and valid exchange rate theory. There has been broad consensus among economists for decades that changes in the

Technology Diffusion, Human Capital and Economic Growth in Developing Countries This paper (i) uses a newly constructed dataset on machinery imports from both developed and developing countries with significant domestic R&D expenditure to assess technology transfer to developing countries, and...